I like WIMP and don't want to see it die
Posted by Antonio 1 month, 1 week ago (June 19, 2010)
In the past two months there have been a bunch of articles about how touch is the future of all computing, and how the launch of the iPad has given the rest of the industry the blueprint to follow. As much as I might want a new Macbook Air to ship, it would seem that Apple is only interested in single surface devices. Even pokey HP is betting a billion dollars on Palm as its option for the future.
Despite this, I don't know that I agree that I want to poke everything with my fat finger instead of using a pixel-accurate pointing device. More importantly, I am not sure that I'm ready to say goodbye to overlapping windows, perhaps the single most productive feature of the GUI. Multitasking is nice (and I suspect it will eventually come to all of these new devices in a good form), but so is the ability to keep several windows open on the screen at the same time. Browser, text editor, shell, IM client, etc.
Am I the only one who thinks that doing away with this in favor of the single canvas application is a mistake? Even for the mainstream user?
I agree with this: in the era of the Google box and multiple devices, files and folders rooted in a local spindle have got to go. I'm just not sure that it makes sense to throw the rest of it away. Hell, even in Minority Report, the MIT Media Lab inspired interface of the future had multiple overlaid contexts up on one screen.
I'm a VC at Matrix Partners living in the Boston area. I've started some stuff, worked at some
places, and I love making things.