Biodata of Mitchell Kapor (creator of Lotus 1-2-3 Spreadsheet Application)

Mitchell Kapor, 54, is the President and Chair of the Open Source Applications Foundation (www.osafoundation.org), a non-profit organization he founded in 2001 to promote the development and acceptance of high-quality application software developed and distributed using open source methods and licenses.

He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the “killer application” which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980’s. He has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.

Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1950 and attended public schools in Freeport, Long Island, where he graduated from high school in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics. At Yale, he was very involved with the college's commercial radio station, WYBC-FM, where he served as Music Director and Program Director.

In the 1970’s Mr. Kapor worked as a disc jockey at WHCN-FM, a commercial progressive rock station in Hartford, Connecticut; became a teacher of Transcendental Meditation and taught TM in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Fairfield, Iowa; and worked as an entry-level computer programmer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1978, he received a Master's degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later called Beacon College) in Boston and worked as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He also attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT, taking a leave of absence one term short of graduation in 1980 in order to take a job in a Silicon Valley start-up company.

In 1978 he bought an Apple II personal computer and worked as an independent software consultant; as the co-developer of Tiny Troll, the first graphics and statistics program for the Apple II; as a product manager for Personal Software Inc., the publisher of VisiCalc, the world’s first electronic spreadsheet; and as the designer and programmer (in BASIC) of VisiPlot and VisiTrend, companion products to VisiCalc.

He founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and with Jonathan Sachs, who was responsible for technical architecture and implementation, created Lotus 1-2-3. He served as the President (later Chairman) and Chief Executive Officer of Lotus from 1982 to 1986 and as a Director until 1987. In 1983, Lotus’ first year of operations, the company achieved revenues of $53,000,000 and had a successful public offering. In 1984 the company tripled in revenue to $156,000,000. The number of employees grew to over a thousand by 1985.

After leaving executive management at Lotus, he spent 1986 and 1987 completing work on his favorite product, Lotus Agenda, the first application for Personal Information Management (PIM), and as a visiting scientist at MIT's Center for Cognitive Science and the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. From 1987-1990 Mr. Kapor served as the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of ON Technology, a developer of software applications for workgroup computing. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. The EFF is a non-profit civil liberties organization working in the public interest to protect privacy, free expression, and access to public resources and information online, as well as to promote responsibility in new media.

In 1992 and 1993 he chaired the Massachusetts Commission on Computer Technology and Law which was chartered to investigate and report on issues raised by the problem of computer crime in the state. He also served as a member of the Computer Science and Technology Board of the National Research Council and the National Information Infrastructure Advisory Council.

From 1994-1996, he served as Adjunct Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab where he taught courses on software design, Democracy and the Internet, and digital community.

For almost 20 years, Mr. Kapor has been an investor in high-technology start-up companies (through Kapor Enterprises, Inc.) and an advisor to entrepreneurs. He was a founding investor of UUNET and Real Networks. He is also Chairman of the Board of Linden Research, founded by Philip Rosedale, former CTO of Real Networks.

From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Kapor was a partner at Accel Partners, a leading venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. He has also served on the boards of Groove Networks founded by Ray Ozzie, the developer of Lotus Notes; Ximian, and Reactivity.

From 1984 until its dissolution in 1998, Mr. Kapor served as a trustee of the Kapor Family Foundation. Beginning in 1997, he created and endowed the Mitchell Kapor Foundation (www.mkf.org), a private foundation focused on the intersection of health and the environment, the social impact of information technology, and the removing barriers to full participation in education and the workplace by historically disadvantaged groups.

In 2003 he became the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation (www.mozilla.org), which is dedicated to the development and promulgation of standards-compliant open source web browser software.

Mr. Kapor is a trustee of the Level Playing Field Institute (www.lpfi.org), a San Francisco-based non-profit research organization, whose mission is to enhance equal opportunity in the workplace and support the values of an inclusive society.

Mr. Kapor has written widely about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to publications such as Scientific American, The New York Times, Forbes, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and Communications of the ACM. Mr. Kapor is married and lives in San Francisco, California.

http://www.kapor.com/bio/index.html

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Microsoft Fellowship for 2 Indians

HOUSTON: Microsoft Research has named two Indian Americans amongst the first five recipients of its New Faculty Fellowship Awards, a new programme that honours early-career university professors who demonstrate exceptional talent for novel research and thought leadership in their discipline.

The two Indian Americans Subhash Khot and Radhika Nagpal were selected from a pool of 110 nominees representing universities across the US. Khot and Nagpal, along with three other fellows, will receive a $200,000 cash grant to pursue their innovative research work in computer science.

The winners are also given the opportunity to explore collaborations with some of the top researchers working in their area of interest at Microsoft Research. "We have much to learn, and much to gain, from today's talented young minds," said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

"Even early in their teaching careers, these award winners are pushing the boundaries of computer science research in exciting new directions. The intellectual curiosity, creative drive and thought leadership they demonstrate is exactly the sort of initiative we seek to encourage in developing programs like the New Faculty Fellowship Awards."

Subhash Khot is a first-year assistant professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Khot's research tackles fundamental questions regarding which problems can and cannot be solved quickly on a computer.

The questions Khot addresses in his work often have deep connections to diverse areas in mathematics, logic, cryptography and computer science. Radhika Nagpal is a first-year assistant professor of computer science in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Her research interest is in engineering self-organising, self-repairing systems, using inspiration from biology, and in better understanding robust collective behaviour in biological systems.

The University Relations group at Microsoft Research established the New Faculty Fellowship Awards programme to identify and support exceptional first-year, second-year and third-year professors who are advancing the state of the art of computer science research.

Microsoft Research said it recognises that until young professors can build a reputation, they typically struggle to secure adequate funding for their research work. The programme accepts just one nominee per university and includes a rigorous, multi-round selection process that culminates in live interviews before a distinguished panel of reviewers from Microsoft Research and the academic community.

"This programme offers a major boost to a young faculty member with an exciting research vision," said Maria Klawe, dean of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, who helped judge the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship Awards. "It provides support and credibility for long-term and perhaps risky initiatives.

This is extremely important for the field of computing because computing has been trying to cope with major reductions in the funding of fundamental research by government and industry," she said.

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Netscape 8 Clashes With Internet Explorer's XML Rendering

from http://www.techsmec.com/index.php/2005/05/27/netscape_8_clashes_with_internet_explore

If you view RSS feeds in Internet Explorer, but you've recently downloaded Netscape 8, you may have noticed a few problems, namely that you can't see them any more.
"We have just confirmed an issue that has started to be reported on newsgroups and forums that, after installing Netscape 8, the XML rendering capabilities of Internet Explorer no longer work," wrote Dave Massy, senior programme manager for IE, on the Microsoft IE blog.He posted the following workaround.

1. Uninstall Netscape 8
2. START->RUN
1. Type: regedit 2. Hit ENTER
3. Navigate to the following:
4. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Plugins\Extension
5. Highlight and right-click the node titled "xml" and select delete.
6. Restart Internet Explorer

Unfortunately if Netscape 8 remains installed then the registry key is continually rewritten so this is an essential step if you are to be able to view XML content in IE.

According to AOL, however, this workaround is unnecessary. "This issue affects a very small number of users who visit sites that require that advanced technology," said Andrew Weinstein, an AOL spokesman, implying that AOL users may not be the most advanced of netizens if they don't bother with RSS feeds.

"We would not encourage people to uninstall or effect their browser settings," Weinstein said, attempting to protect Netscape 8's currently small share of the browser market. "It's a minor issue."

Netscape said they would release a fix next week.

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Gates's vision - and failure thereof

Bill Gates just gave a talk at a Gartner symposium where he predicted that hardware would get so cheap as to be essentially free. This is a pretty visionary idea -- and, I think, plausible enough; you can buy a $0.99 singing greeting card today with more computing power than all the world's digital computers at the launch of Sputnik (multiple Soviet space-programs' worth of cycles for under a buck!), so the idea of powerful, useful hardware going ubiquitous and cheap is pretty nifty and pretty credible.

In the same breath, though, Gates predicts that software won't be free -- though he has no good explanation for this (presumably, it's because universal free software would be bad for his buiness, so he can't bring himself to contemplate the possibility). This kind of blinkered thinking does Microsoft -- which could be capable of pursuing lots of profitable strategies that don't involve fighting the future tooth and nail -- no credit. If the senior management at Microsoft is this head-in-sand over production trends in software, maybe it's time for the Board of Directors to think about hiring a new chief architect and CEO.

I suspect that it was this kind of thinking that led Microsoft superstar David Stutz to write his blazing resignation when he quit the company last year.

Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't.

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Microsoft and the Commoditization of Software

This article is from the following website: http://www.synthesist.net/writing/onleavingms.html

Advice to Microsoft regarding commodity software
(c) 2003 David Stutz

The market for shrink-wrap PC software began its slow upmarket ooze into Christensen obsolescence right around the time that Microsoft really hit its stride. That was also the time of the Internet wave, a phenomenon that Microsoft co-opted without ever really internalizing into product wisdom. While those qualified to move the state of the art forward went down in the millennial flames of the dotcom crash, Microsoft's rigorous belief in the physics of business reality saved both the day and the profits. But the tide had turned, and a realization that "the net" was a far more interesting place than "the PC" began to creep into the heads of consumers and enterprises alike.

During this period, most core Microsoft products missed the Internet wave, even while claiming to be leading the parade. Office has yet to move past the document abstraction, despite the world's widespread understanding that websites (HTML, HTTP, various embedded content types, and Apache mods) are very useful things. Windows has yet to move past its PC-centric roots to capture a significant part of the larger network space, although it makes a hell of a good client. Microsoft developer tools have yet to embrace the loosely coupled mindset that today's leading edge developers apply to work and play.

Microsoft's reluctance to adopt networked ways is understandable. Their advantaged position has been built over the years by adhering to the tenet that software running on a PC is the natural point at which to integrate hardware and applications. Unfortunately, network protocols have turned out to be a far better fit for this middleman role, and Microsoft, intent on propping up the PC franchise, has had to resist fully embracing the network integration model. This corporate case of denial has left a vacuum, of course, into which hardware companies, enterprises, and disgruntled Microsoft wannabes have poured huge quantities of often inferior, but nonetheless requirements-driven, open source software. Microsoft still builds the world's best client software, but the biggest opportunity is no longer the client. It still commands the biggest margin, but networked software will eventually eclipse client-only software.

As networked computing infrastructure matures, the PC client business will remain important in the same way that automotive manufacturers, rail carriers, and phone companies remained important while their own networks matured. The PC form factor will push forward; the Pocket PC, the Tablet PC, and other forms will emerge. But automakers, railroads, and phone companies actually manufacture their products, rather than selling intangible bits on a CD to hardware partners. Will Microsoft continue to convince its partners that software is distinctly valuable by itself? Or will the commodity nature of software turn the industry on its head? The hardware companies, who actually manufacture the machines, smell blood in the water, and the open source software movement is the result.

Especially in a maturing market, software expertise still matters, and Microsoft may very well be able to sidestep irrelevance as it has in the past. The term "PC franchise" is not just a soundbite; the number of programs written for the PC that do something useful (drive a loom, control a milling machine, create a spreadsheet template, edit a recording...) is tremendous. But to continue leading the pack, Microsoft must innovate quickly. If the PC is all that the future holds, then growth prospects are bleak. I've spent a lot of time during the last few years participating in damage-control of various sorts, and I respect the need for serious adult supervision. Recovering from current external perceptions of Microsoft as a paranoid, untrustworthy, greedy, petty, and politically inept organization will take years. Being the lowest cost commodity producer during such a recovery will be arduous, and will have the side-effect of changing Microsoft into a place where creative managers and accountants, rather than visionaries, will call the shots.

If Microsoft is unable to innovate quickly enough, or to adapt to embrace network-based integration, the threat that it faces is the erosion of the economic value of software being caused by the open source software movement. This is not just Linux. Linux is certainly a threat to Microsoft's less-than-perfect server software right now (and to its desktop in the not-too-distant future), but open source software in general, running especially on the Windows operating system, is a much bigger threat. As the quality of this software improves, there will be less and less reason to pay for core software-only assets that have become stylized categories over the years: Microsoft sells OFFICE (the suite) while people may only need a small part of Word or a bit of Access. Microsoft sells WINDOWS (the platform) but a small org might just need a website, or a fileserver. It no longer fits Microsoft's business model to have many individual offerings and to innovate with new application software. Unfortunately, this is exactly where free software excels and is making inroads. One-size-fits-all, one-app-is-all-you-need, one-api-and-damn-the-torpedoes has turned out to be an imperfect strategy for the long haul.

Digging in against open source commoditization won't work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: "better together," "unified platform," and "integrated software." There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won't.

Exciting new networked applications are being written. Time is not standing still. Microsoft must survive and prosper by learning from the open source software movement and by borrowing from and improving its techniques. Open source software is as large and powerful a wave as the Internet was, and is rapidly accreting into a legitimate alternative to Windows. It can and should be harnessed. To avoid dire consequences, Microsoft should favor an approach that tolerates and embraces the diversity of the open source approach, especially when network-based integration is involved. There are many clever and motivated people out there, who have many different reasons to avoid buying directly into a Microsoft proprietary stack. Microsoft must employ diplomacy to woo these accounts; stubborn insistence will be both counterproductive and ineffective. Microsoft cannot prosper during the open source wave as an island, with a defenses built out of litigation and proprietary protocols.

Why be distracted into looking backwards by the commodity cloners of open source? Useful as cloning may be for price-sensitive consumers, the commodity business is low-margin and high-risk. There is a new frontier, where software "collectives" are being built with ad hoc protocols and with clustered devices. Robotics and automation of all sorts is exposing a demand for sophisticated new ways of thinking. Consumers have an unslakable thirst for new forms of entertainment. And hardware vendors continue to push towards architectures that will fundamentally change the way that software is built by introducing fine-grained concurrency that simply cannot be ignored. There is no clear consensus on systems or application models for these areas. Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come.

Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!

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New to blogs

Hi everyone. This is my first attempt towards using blogs. To keep readers interest I will try to post variety of contents. Please make sure to visit.

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