Go Forth (Virtually)
"Well, comment on the article,private"
"I can't Sir, I don't know what it's going on about"
Judging by the nr of comments, this is how we all feel. Perhaps an article for the PHB's.
I spent just an hour with data centre virtualisation upstart Primary Data (set up by Fusion-io's founders) during an IT press tour, but I came away both intrigued and puzzled at the same time. While it has the best vision and ideas I’ve seen in years, at the same time the two-year-old firm's vision seems incredibly hard to …
Apple has to the best of my knowledge never introduced a visionary product. Everything is a much better engineered version of other peoples vision at just the right time for the market.
Woz is great guy he saw teaching children as his highest calling and he did that (I gather) very well.
That said I know of no product inside or outside Apple that Woz has shown a visionaries zeal along with the vision itself. Did Woz do the basic cloud patents? Did he do something unique with data in his new start-up?
Woz has taken lately to be a spokesman for Apple and except when he makes the absurd and grossly false claim that Apple and he Woz invented the PC, thats all right with me.
There were better microprocessor based desktop graphics computers being sold a year before Apple was formed in 1976. It wouldn't be until the early 90's that PCs and Apple PCs began to compete with the graphics. As Jobs told me in 1977 in the storefront Apple "Our customers are happy with character graphics." Indeed they were.
Guess it depends on exactly how you define visionary, but this is interesting reading:
http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
especially the "did it in his spare time from his regular job at HP" part.
From what I could gather from the article, they're talking about hierarchical storage management with a unified address space. Hasn't that been around since, like, 1990?
Maybe some of this is new to commercial data-center technology (that's not an area I spend a lot of time in), but from a computer science, OS-research perspective it doesn't sound very novel. Transparent hierarchical storage was a hot topic for UNIX systems by 1991 or so. The AS/400 had a single address space for all storage objects in 1988. All this stuff sounds nice enough, but hardly mind-blowing.
But perhaps I'm missing something.