Uneventful Backpack
[I]t gives users an easy, casual storage location on the Web, a place to scratch down important notes, draw up to-do lists, and store important files organized around specific tasks (say, all the stuff you need for a business trip). The Wall Street Journal has praised Backpack as the best tool of its kind, and perhaps more important, bloggers have been jumping for joy over it. Lifehacker, a blog that offers tips to help keep your life in order, calls the software "a perfect online replacement (or supplement) to that fancy notebook you've been scribbling in." --Salon, August 10, 2005Someone is going to have to explain how this much-buzzed-about Backpack (oh, that reminds me, take my poll if you still haven't) online utility differs much from an X-drive with some of the useless/unused features of Outlook tacked on. I have to think online to-do lists are not the next next thing. Who wants to sit around typing things into an online to-do list? Hard to find much joy in that. Dexterous programmers, bloggers and nerdy tech journalists might, perhaps, but not typical people.
I'm starting to think the Web can't possibly fulfill its potential to change big sectors of our lives until there are (a) much better input devices, like superb voice recognition and optical character recognition tools and (b) much better output devices--compact and book-like with major wireless bandwidth and battery life.
It's interesting to think about all the talent that's been thrown at hardware, software, networking and the rest, over decades, with the result that there are still bottlenecks at both ends and huge regions of knowledge-work where the best tools are a pad and pencil and a book.
posted at 12:03 AM
1 Comments:
The simple fact that Brett just sold Xdrive to AOL last week means that BACKPACK or whatever is BETTER. Why....why?
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