[via Jon\’s Radio, 1] I propose to go for Ray Ozzies [2] weblog post first and then Jon\’s. It is about telling a fascinating story about a software product on one hand and changing the world with a few dozen lines of text on the other.
What is it about? Ray Ozzie and others have worked on the development of Lotus Notes. He recently became aware of the patent US 5,838,906 and the Eolas lawsuit against Microsoft about the browser experiance. Ray explains in deep how Lotus Notes was built and worked at that time and finally states that
We even shipped it about 18 months before his filing. Lotus was a public company and at the time one of the biggest forces in the personal computing industry, so surely the person or persons doing the patent filing must have or should have known about our hypermedia innovations. Given all the press coverage, he was likely also influenced by them in envisioning his own distributed hypermedia enhancements to the then-nascent Web browser technology.
Jon summarizes that Ray\’s essay could have saved [3] Microsoft more money than Ray invested in his company Groove and finally points out:
Innovation is an act of willful imagination. What you dream up can indeed change the world. But the world keeps changing too, in ways that can require you to refocus your dream. Not an easy thing to do.
[1] http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/09/17.html#a798
[2] http://www.ozzie.net/blog/stories/2003/09/12/savingTheBrowser.html
[3] http://www.rkmc.com/firm_news.asp?newsId=167&iba=Yes
