A New Kind of Productivity Application

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Tim O'Reilly
Nov. 25, 2002 06:42 AM
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One of the off-the-cuff observations I made in the variant of my talk Watching the Alpha Geeks that I delivered at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference was that the iApps represent a new kind of productivity application. A number of people have asked for a written reference for that thought, so I thought I'd better blog it.

The thought begins not with Apple, but with Doug Carlston, the founder of Broderbund Software. When I first met Doug, he was explaining Broderbund's business to me. He explained that they had three lines of business: games (like Myst), "edutainment" (like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego), and productivity applications (like Print Shop Pro.)" I asked, "Where does Family Tree Maker fit in?" "Oh, that's a productivity application. We consider a productivity application to be any application where the user's own data matters more to him than the data we provide."

"What a great definition!" I thought, and filed it away for future reference, trotting it out as often as appropriate, because it is a profound thought that ought to be in as many software developers' heads as possible.

When adapting my talk for the OS X Conference, Doug's remarks came back to mind, because it seems to me that Apple's iApp designers understand them in a profound new way. For years, we've let office productivity applications define "productivity," yet Apple knows that the new frontier of productivity is not a new spreadsheet, word processor, or email client, but rather, tools for managing a consumer's growing array of digital assets: photos, music, and videos.

I'm not sure that anyone has plumbed the depths of the new productivity suite. Clearly, as we all own larger and larger hard disks, with more and more data on them, productivity will mean digital asset management at a new scale. We not only need to store and retrieve our photos and music, we need to edit, share, and annotate them. New digital asset types are coming onstream all the time, and new devices for capturing and exchanging them. So there's a brave new world ahead, not only for Apple users, but also for Windows users as Microsoft and various other software developers get into the act.

Meanwhile, the "alpha geeks" are already extending the simple databases in the iApps, adding more robust databases, scripting, and the like.

Tim O'Reilly is the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world, and an activist for open standards. O'Reilly Media also publishes online through the O'Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference. Tim's blog, the O'Reilly Radar "watches the alpha geeks" to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. For everything Tim, see tim.oreilly.com.

What other new productivity applications do you see?
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Showing messages 1 through 7 of 7.

Apps and Books.
2002-11-30 21:44:05 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

Howard Rheingold's latest book, Smart Mobs (details and a blog at http://www.smartmobs.com), is fairly essential reading on the future (and past/present) of mobile communication and social exchange.

--
for productivity/sharing apps, try:
openCOLA (http://www.opencola.com)
swarmcast (oss version)(http://sourceforge.net/projects/swarmcast/ )
and
thebrain (http://www.thebrain.com/)

Content vs. Productivity
2002-11-25 15:09:19 asaweinstein [Reply | View]

Interesting blog...I have been telling my customers for years that all of their Hardware and Software is worth virtually nothing in relation to the thousands of hours they have spent creating content WITH that Hardware and Software. Hence my continued emphasis on backup and restore technologies, storing backups offsite and other tricks to preserve the created content. I would concur on that little nugget of programmers wisdom which you wisely leapt upon to store for future use. A piece of software that chugs through data is productive only if the data is meaningful in some altered state to the user. Just like family photos, and home-movies are meaningful (other than for artistic merit) to their respective owners and their families. Useless data that is processed blazingly fast by fancy hardware and software is still useless in the end.

Tinderbox
2002-11-25 13:43:52 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

Note to previous poster: Tinderbox keeps notes in XML, too. And, unlike OneNote, it actually exists.

BeFS
2002-11-25 09:58:56 tpherndon [Reply | View]

One of the major factors in dealing with the extensive amount of data is being able to find it when you want it.

To that end, I think that something like BeFS, or the always-upcoming WinFS needs to be the base for information management in the modern era.

Why would I want to look through a file system to find my data? The first thing that the iApps do is put a searchable index with metadata on top of the existing file system, and then do their best to hide the file system from the user. With BeFS, you had that built in to the file system itself -- usable, extensible file metadata and whiz-bang searching. A file system growing attributes of a database management system. So, your apps would get these data management features for free, and you could spend more time building functionality into the app itself. Or getting on with the rest of your life.

Epiphany
2002-11-25 08:39:41 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

Well, if you really want to see something inovative, check out ZOE:

http://guests.evectors.it/zoe/

And read Jon Udell's review:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/07/udell.html

Two good apps
2002-11-25 07:36:36 anonymous2 [Reply | View]

One I use all the time and the other has only recently been announced:

OmniOutliner (http://www.omnigroup.com/) is a great freeform outlining tool that has a considerable number of features. As a writer, I rely on outlines. Plus, I've heard of some utterly amazing uses of the tool.

OneNote (http://www.microsoft.com/office/onenote/overview.asp) sounds like an amazing notetaking app. The ability to freely place text, graphics, and audio sounds like exactly the note-taking app I've longed for. Boswell for the Mac sounds close, as does Tinderbox. If this app stores the data in some sort of XML-based document, I would buy it in a heartbeat. I sure hope it's available for the Mac.

I nominate Moveable Type
2002-11-25 06:57:58 John Adams [Reply | View]

I blew off a personal home page for years, until I had this tool. Now, hardly a day goes by that I don't weblog something--and I have a handy place to which I can refer people for interesting items.

Showing messages 1 through 7 of 7.

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