[Web4lib] MS Windows Live Book Search

[Lars Aronsson]

Hankinson, Andrew wrote:

> I do think competition is good, but it has to be good competition.
> Taking one company's idea and creating a knock-off of it, however
> successful the knock-off is, shouldn't be mistaken for competition.

I'd say you've got this wrong all together.

In computer user interfaces, Xerox was an original.  Apple's Lisa 
copied ideas from Xerox, and evolved them into the 1984 Macintosh 
and today's Mac OS X.  Microsoft Windows, released in 1985, copied 
ideas from the 1984 Macintosh.  After Xerox, the next invention 
came in 1993 when Marc Andreessen took Tim Berners-Lee's primitive 
ASCII text World-Wide-Web and turned it into a graphical user 
interface, based not on an operating system but on the Internet.

Linux (1991) of course is a copy of Unix (1969), and KDE (1996) is 
a copy of CDE, the Common Desktop Environment (1995?).  Few people 
remember CDE and that is only good.  Neither Linux nor KDE bring 
new inventions, and that's not their mission.  They are freely 
redistributable and open source rewrites of older proprietary 
systems.  If you don't need the source code and don't mind to pay, 
you can get Unix and CDE for your PC from a number of vendors.

In book digitization, Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg should be 
credited with having made clear that it should be done.  The 
"Making of America" project at the University of Michigan should 
be credited with having shown (1996) that it could be done with 
scanned images on the web on a large scale.  This is the idea that 
Google Book Search picked up almost a *decade* later.  And not 
surprisingly, UMich was one of Google's first partners.

But in that decade, others had done so before Google, including 
the "Million Book Project" at Carnegie Mellon University.  The 
ever innovative Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive made the 
MBP available on the net, and forged the "Open Content Alliance" 
that allows Yahoo and Microsoft to claim they are competing with 
Google Book Search, while in fact they are only putting their 
money into Kahle's digitization efforts.  Whenever I hear that 
"OCA is scanning", I ask "who?".  It's the University of Toronto.

The world is moving forward, and that's good.  But when we write 
the history books, the older projects can't have borrowed from the 
younger ones.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se