伟大这回事，可遇不可求！说是什么时代，什么天赋，什么魄力，加起来也不容易解释史密斯怎可以写得出他的《国富论》，马歇尔怎可以写得出他的《经济学原理》。愈想愈不明，恐惧与敬畏之心怎样也禁不住！这就是我说的伟大了。我们作为后学的可以青出于蓝吗？应该可以，因为这是我们要尝试的责任。说青出于蓝是说较为到家，与伟大相比，微不足道。

王羲之是个伟大的书法家，青出于蓝我这个老头子办不到，但办到的曾经出现过。

mozilla基金会的firefox浏览已经取得了极大的成功，甚至已经成立了公司进行推广运作；现在他们决定再成立一家公司来推广邮件客户端thunderbird，这家公司也将是赢利性质的，请到的主管是activestate公司的cto，david ascher，如果在windows上用perl的话可能会知道这家公司。

这个动作的目的当然就是推动thunderbird的发展，让它成为网络通信的中坚，甚至还考虑如何同im，rss，voip，sms这些通信方式的协作问题。

去年10月刚刚有高通公司╠╠就是做cdma律师比工程师多的那家，把自己的eudora邮件客户端贡献出来，放在mozilla项目这里，要搞成开源的。现在已经发布了一个新的beta版，称为penelope，基于thunderbird，但按eudora的固有方式操作。所以有个问题就是这个项目会不会也加入这个公司？现在他们的开发人员还都是高通的。这个软件各处感觉都很像thunderbird，并且会直接使用thunderbird的信箱，不知道这样会不会冲突。

希望能有一个更加好用的thunderbird推出。但email使用方式的另一个强力竞争者其实是google的gmail，有时候简直令人难以取舍，现在我基本已经选择了gmail，打开thunderbird的机会已经很少了。

ibm just released an open-source office suite called ibm lotus symphony. sounds like yet another staroffice distribution. but i suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the original lotus symphony, which had been hyped as the second coming and which fell totally flat. it was the software equivalent of gigli.

in the late 80s, lotus was trying very hard to figure out what to do next with their flagship spreadsheet and graphics product, lotus 1-2-3. there two obvious ideas: first, they could add more features. word processing, say. this product was called symphony. another idea which seemed obvious was to make a 3-d spreadsheet. that became 1-2-3 version 3.0.

both ideas ran head-first into a serious problem: the old dos 640k memory limitation. ibm was starting to ship a few computers with 80286 chips, which could address more memory, but lotus didn’t think there was a big enough market for software that needed a $10,000 computer to run. so they squeezed and squeezed. they spent 18 months cramming 1-2-3 for dos into 640k, and eventually, after a lot of wasted time, had to give up the 3d feature to get it to fit. in the case of symphony, they just chopped features left and right.

neither strategy was right. by the time 123 3.0 was shipping, everybody had 80386s with 2m or 4m of ram. and symphony had an inadequate spreadsheet, an inadequate word processor, and some other inadequate bits.

“that’s nice, old man,” you say. “who gives a fart about some old character mode software?”

humor me for a minute, because history is repeating itself, in three different ways, and the smart strategy is to bet on the same results.

from the beginning of time until about, say, 1989, programmers were extremely concerned with efficiency. there just wasn’t that much memory and there just weren’t that many cpu cycles.

in the late 90s a couple of companies, including microsoft and apple, noticed (just a little bit sooner than anyone else) that moore’s law meant that they shouldn’t think too hard about performance and memory usage… just build cool stuff, and wait for the hardware to catch up. microsoft first shipped excel for windows when 80386s were too expensive to buy, but they were patient. within a couple of years, the 80386sx came out, and anybody who could afford a $1500 clone could run excel.

as a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and cpu speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. you could six months rewriting your inner loops in assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. assembler programmers don’t have groupies.

so, we don’t care about performance or optimization much anymore.