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Re: MaxThink
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 776
Posted by ebuise
2000-10-13 14:50:14
On the 28th of september he mailed me: “I hope to anounce the beta on windows maxthink in two weeks.”
I also have the experience that he makes announcements like this one during the past few years (By the way I’m an enthousiastic and dedicated user of Neil’s products since -I think- 1987). But something is changing. The trend is that his promises capture smaller and smaller periods. The very first announcement talked about “next year”.
Another indication is that I work with the converter (max2word) for half a year now, and it works fine, for me. The other way around (Word2Max) doesn’t work for me, because I still haven’t figured out the ideal / suitable word format or lay-out to make a conversion succesfull.
Anyway, I have the distinct idea that an adequate follow up to his dos-based MaxThink is what he strongly wants.
At this time, I really hope he will come up with something revolutional, again! Because in the past 16 months new developments could be spotted via the internet. Think of http://www.thebrain.com, AXON2000, the developments around MindManager. That’s for what I can recall at this very moment. The trend is that at several places people are making an attempt to develop the true next generation of intuitive performance support tools for knowledge workers/thinkers. This will relate strongly to the next generation of WWW too.
Not only Maxthink proved to be supurb in the era before Internet and Win95 came up (1995/1996). Also his Hypertext viewers and tools (like TransText) and Houdini were very special (Houdini still can be very usefull). The man is conceptually very strong. I think he can do his trick again. Question is what’s bothering him, whether he has the right hands at his side, whether he has the time, whether he can make the right priorities. MaxThink and Houdini were multi-purpose tools, the sky was almost the usability limit. In 1996 he attempted to inspire the world with his groupware-based internet application depending on the development of Real-Audio (and alike) applications and infrastructure. What I want to say is that his mind is probably gone to another horizon when you and I reach a certain point of possibilities in this context.
I might buy/register/use AXON2000 beside (DOS) Maxthink97. But still, I’ll wait for Neil. He’s probably in his fifties now, so…