Backed by popular Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet creator Mitch Kapor, fueled by the open source revolution, the Open Software Applications Foundation's Chandler remains a personal information manager in gestation five years after work began. Scott Rosenberg, in the new book Dreaming in Code, chronicles this process and reveals the hard truths that don't change from decade to decade about creating innovative software. Rosenberg expands on the book's comparisons to the fortunes of two other large projects: the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge rebuild, and Microsoft's Windows Vista. In particular, Rosenberg highlights the notion of bringing "siloless" data to users which bedevils both the Chandler team and Microsoft WinFS team. Rosenberg comments on the usefulness of constraints, starting with Apple's new iPhone, and the shortcomings of Web-only applications. Rosenberg also takes issue with the simplicity of David Platt's call for customers to demand that software should "just work."
Scott Rosenberg is a writer and editor. He cofounded Salon back in 1995 and is currently vice-president of new projects at Salon. He served as its first technology editor and all-around Web geek for years, then became managing editor just in time for the dot-com bubble to first over-inflate and then collapse. In 2003 he began working on a book about software development and its discontents. Rosenberg took a leave from Salon in 2005 to write it; the result is Dreaming in Code, published in January 2007 by Crown. Rosenberg started making Web pages in November 1994 as an editor of the short-lived San Francisco Free Press — an early experiment in Web publishing by the striking Newspaper Guild workers in San Francisco. Rosenberg wrote for the San Francisco Examiner from 1986 to 1995, serving first as its theater critic, then as its movie critic and “digital culture” columnist. His theater criticism won the George Jean Nathan prize in 1989. He had written theater, movie and book reviews for the Boston Phoenix. Rosenberg graduated from Harvard in 1981, and spent the bulk of his time as an undergraduate writing and editing at the Harvard Crimson.
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