The Right Tool For the Job, by Jeffrey Veen

The Right Tool For the Job

Years ago, I remember hearing a quote attributed to former Netscape engineer Jamie Zawinski that went something like, "All software expands until it can read email." I'm sure he was referring to the exponential growth in size of his company's Web software -- something that was inevitable, since they were trying to position the browser as just a component in a much larger Web platform. I'm not sure if JWZ actually said that, since I could find no trace of it on his site (update: here it is). But he certainly is quoted as saying it a lot.

I mention this because I think it's time for an update. If things keep going at the pace there are, all software will expand until it can aggregate RSS feeds.

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 17 August 2004 at 7:02 AM. It was filed under Technology.

Comments

1. On 17 August 2004 at 8:23 AM Andy Baio wrote:

It was JWZ's Law of Software Envelopment:

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

2. On 17 August 2004 at 8:24 AM Andy Baio wrote:

Ack, you have HTML disabled. The quote is from this page: http://www.jwz.org/hacks/

3. On 17 August 2004 at 9:23 AM Anil wrote:

I've been thinking this too, for a while... I think it was an open-source Tivo clone that couldn't record shows, couldn't display a TV schedule, but supportd skins and RSS reading. And all these ubiquitous RSS readers usually fail on some large percentage of the feeds they try to read.

4. On 17 August 2004 at 10:40 AM veen wrote:

Why are you so hateful, Anil? Just install Python on your Tivo and use Mark's parser. Problem solved. Sheesh.

5. On 17 August 2004 at 4:39 PM Mark Eichin wrote:

It predates Netscape significantly (if anything, EMACS is the inspiration, through its logical conclusion was reached when Gnu Hello added mail support...)

RSS has gotten to the stage where people are concluding that it is simple *and* useful, instead of just simple, so we've got lots of interesting experiments now - if it's easy enough to experiment with [there's an Excel-based RSS reader now, "eww"] then maybe something *good* will actually emerge...

6. On 18 August 2004 at 7:04 AM Onno wrote:

I know you're a big fan of RSS, but isn't RSS just a way to exchange information, and will all software expand until it can exchange information with any other advanced piece of software?

7. On 20 August 2004 at 10:28 PM James Z wrote:

All software will expand until it is a email reading application that syndicates itself in valid xml.