[cap-talk] Some good advice for disruptive technologies

[James A. Donald]

On 2011-01-09 5:30 AM, David Barbour wrote:
> There is no analog.
>
> There is a significant qualitative difference between platform
> technologies (such as electrical grids, telephony systems, roadways
> and railways, operating systems, HTML, programming languages) and
> individual consumer technologies (such as Chop-o-Matic, specific
> applications).
>
> You won't sell capabilities alone. You need a killer application,
> which just happens to expose capabilities to the user in some manner
> that encourages an education on the subject.

"exposing capabilities to the user" is seldom a good idea, and 
"educating the user" means our UI is broken - the idea behind OS's 
modelled on capdesk is not to educate the user, but to ensure that the 
OS works as the user naively and innocently expects it to work.

Similarly, it would probably be a good idea to ensure that if a message 
appeared to come from someone on your contacts list, it did in fact come 
from someone on your contact list, and if you send a message to someone 
on your contacts list, it is received by that one and no other, and to 
do this one must employ capabilities, but that is not "exposing 
capabilities to the user", nor is it "educating the user about capabilities"