'The Rise of Worse is Better'

[Joseph Osako <scholr@xxxxxxxx>]

At the party last month I discussed with some people the difficulty in
explaining to those who are familiar with the WWW the advantages Xanadu
could offer. I specifically mentioned to someone - off hand, I can't recall
who - Richard Gabriel's famous essay entitled, "The Rise of 'Worse is
Better'", which they were not familiar with. I decided to post the URL to
it to the mailing list, as it describes in detail exactly the problems we
face in that regard (the essay is actually about why UNIX and C 'stole' the
workstation market from the LISPers in the mid-eighties, but the essential
issue of expensive superior performance tomorrow vs. cheap, quick and dirty
today are the same). I forgot about that until now, but I was discussing it
with someone else in another context and it jogged my memory. Better late
than never:
 
http://www.ai.mit.edu/docs/articles//good-news/subsection3.2.1.html

Any comments?
J Osako
Programmer Analyst, Operating Systems Designer, Notational Engineer
http://www.slip.net/~scholr/resume.html