Re: MyInfo 3, Jot+, etc., and the vital need for calendars

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2347

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-12-24 13:01:23

You pretty much have to buy a heater with a car, even if you live in the hottest tropics, but those who reside there might prefer to avoid the purchase. You can easily buy a car without an air conditioner, on the other hand. It’s a question of how vital the function is, whether he part of he market that doesn’t need or want the accessory is negligible or significant.

Information management tools have different biases. Some are oriented toward email (Outlook); others primarily toward tasks (Time & Chaos); others to information (UltraRecall; MyInfo3; Idea!). To my mind, the main observation here is that these are the three best information managers today. The decision to avoid time management seems to correlate with excellence in their chosen domain. This suggests to me (despite the risk of inferring causation from correlation) that including a calendar is not harmless to the other functions, even if only because of the direction of programming time. And I don’t know it is only that.

The three biases I noted above can be blended in various ways, but you seem to be saying that every information management tool must have calendaring functionality, that no choice by the developer to omit that functionality completely can be intelligent. MyInfo, I understand, has a strong presence in the gamers’ market. Why would a gamer want a program weighted down by calendaring code? Some programs aim at corporate use, where a secretary might track a user’s schedule, but the user would be apt to keep his own store of information. Or the information store might be central (as anticipated by Idea! Team Edition), but the calendar individual.

I’m against imposing a calendar on every information management tool.

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