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by Michael Cote.
Original Post: Re: Why is Scheduling So Hard
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(Disclaimer: if you see brown spots blow, that's because I pulled most of this out of my ass.)
The problem with calendaring is that it's an enterprise app: it's not a consumer app. Things like blogs and RSS were (if only to dorks) consumer applications.
To standardize on calendaring -- and make it easier to share scheduling cross-organization/system -- you'd have to get "millions" of people using the same system/format. This seems to be how blogs and RSS became the de facto standard: people just started using them, and it was too late to do otherwise once Anyone Important started paying attention.
But, since consumers aren't really interested in calendaring (thus, no mass-market for it), only enterprises are willing to pay for calendaring. And...we all know that enterprise software doesn't result in universal apps: at best, it'll work on all the systems behind-the-firewall, and those systems might talk to each other.
For me, Exchange works just fine...as long as I have an app that can suck data from it, and put data back into it. (I hate Entourage on OS X! Why doesn't it just work with iCal?!) I think the rest of The-People-Who-Pay-The-Bills think the same way: Exchange works, what's left to innovate?
Commoditize It.
There's not enough wood behind the payoff-arrow to make calendaring work across different systems, ubiquitous...commoditized. Indeed, I bet MS fights tooth and nail to keep it from becoming commoditized, and companies (The-People-Who-Pay-The-Bills) probably don't care.
The best response to this is for The Others to commoditize the market just like The Others did to IM. Now-a-days, it doesn't matter if you have Y!, MSN, ICQ (GAH! IDIOT!), SameTime, whatever: you just install a GAIM client (like Adium), and you can talk on all those networks, seamlessly (except for the horror of setting up an account on ICQ).
That's what we want with calendaring: we can use whatever app we want and get the full-effect: Exchange, iCal, Sunbird, or some other whacky thing. To do that, some folks just need to start hacking up Exchange interfaces: you work with the incumbent for a long time, bending to it's will. Then, when enough momentum builds up, you can start making demands on it, and then, you've got a de facto standard (the Exchange interface). And then, someone(s) develops a whole new app to that standard.
BLAMMO! First you latch onto the de facto standard, write clients for it, then you replicate the once incumbent technology. That seems like a plan. Then maybe we can all finally be on the same calendar page.
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