| Sunday, September 22, 2002 |
12:51 - RADiCal ...(Okay, you do better...)
http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,55244,00.html
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Wow. It's only been a week since iCal was released, and there's already a Wired article about a site that's sprung up to take full advantage of iCal's ability to publish and share calendars freely, using only a standard web server. The site is iCalShare.com, and I've checked it out-- it looks pretty dang neat. Apple had already posted a few public calendars people could subscribe to (movie openings, US holidays, TV premieres), but it took someone apparently all of ten minutes to realize that anybody could run a clearing-house site to host calendars like that, and to allow individuals to post their own calendars and merge them dynamically with other people's.
This looks like a job for... The Internet!
There are calendars for shuttle launches, bible readings, Mac tradeshows, National Hockey League teams, NASCAR races, the America's Cup, soccer matches in the Netherlands and Formula One races.
There are also calendars for the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Iron Chef TV show, the new Survivor series, the New York Yankees, Russian public holidays, school holidays in Luxembourg and significant dates related to Rush, the Canadian progressive-rock group -- including tour dates and band members' birthdays.
"The diversity and scope of calendars coming in continues to surprise me," said Crowley. "It's like a micropublishing revolution. Everybody's an expert on something, and they all want to share their expertise, but without all the fuss of making a Web page or website."
Thanks to Crowley's site, all the work of entering calendar dates is done by someone else who shares similar interests.
The service is free, and calendars are automatically updated when the creators make changes. Of course, you're at their mercy if they make mistakes.
The free iCal application has been available for just over one week, yet Crowley already has collected more than 100 calendars and expects to double that by the end of the week. It's likely to snowball.
"Part of Apple's recent success is its robust online community," Crowley said. "Hopefully, iCalshare will become part of that."
Boy howdy. Apple's one of those companies that understands how people want to work, and they write tools which play to just those tendencies. Lately they've seen not only how people tend to use the Internet, but how they love to use the Internet-- e.g. setting up websites for common interests and shared goals, and running them like small entrepreneurial businesses as more and more people come on board. All they were missing was the right tool.
It's like with iPhoto, which has created small businesses like one quoted on the Switch page in which a woman stays at home, has people send her collections of digital or film photos, and then organizes and edits them in iPhoto and make those hardcover photo books that she then orders through Apple. She then collects a healthy profit on the price she gets from the client. She's not the only one doing this, either.
Both Apple's and Mozilla's applications are based on an open, standard-file format called iCal, which was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force.
The iCal format is supported by a variety of calendaring software, including Microsoft's Outlook.
"It's another example of Apple taking an open standard and making it truly useful," Crowley said. "I'm sure other calendar vendors will shortly follow in Apple's footsteps with their own calendar-sharing stuff."
Kris was telling me last night about one of the WWDC keynote speeches from back in May, in which one of the engineering directors was talking about UNIX and Apple's vision for how to build on it. They're focusing on "smaller is better" and "open standards are good"; they're under a strict mandate not to change anything in the underlying UNIX unless they have to. Development infrastructure is geared toward fast code implementation, which is why OS X is so slow-- it's as pure an object-oriented platform as we've ever seen in widespread use. There are layers upon layers of abstraction APIs which must be called during any particular function, and while parts of this can be optimized, Apple really can't push the speed of OS X-- particularly in the user interface-- to the level of Windows without fundamentally undermining their ideals of object-based development. All they can really do is throw CPU speed at it (which we'll have, hopefully, in about a year). Personally, if the benefits are programs like iCal and iPhoto which they can whip out in a couple of months' time, then I'm all for it. I'd far rather have that-- applications whose underlying code is effectively "already written", freeing up the developers to make it robust, attractive, intuitive, and above all useful-- rather than a whole lot of talk and bluster that eventually results in yet another drab gray incomprehensible mess like Outlook.
Apple is about creating and enabling... and they do it almost without regard for their own ability to benefit from it. Jobs has always had the weakness (or strength, depending on how the company is doing at a given time) of being confident that customers will choose the better product, and that means Apple will always have a compelling business case. He figures that to succeed, he has to win the hearts-and-minds battle; even if Apple doesn't have a price edge or a performance edge, he believes that people will eventually be won over by the benefits of Macs rather than put off by the disadvantages.
Most people get less and less idealistic as they age, particularly through first-hand experience. But it doesn't appear to have happened to Jobs. He's gotten less brash and willing to take pointless risks on products that would never sell, granted-- but he does know a low-hanging fruit when he sees it, and as with Inkwell in Jaguar, he knows the value of cool.
Cool alone doesn't sell, says the Microsoft school of thought. Apple says, yes it does-- just not in the majority. But it will always have an appreciative audience.
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