But instead of designing interfaces and exploring use cases for tomorrow’s glass-screened gadgets, Victor’s “forty-years-out vision” concerns nothing less than redesigning computing itself — not as a product or service, but “as a medium of thought.”
And this also brings us to the why now and and why is this hard if this is the fully generalized form of digital documents, why didn't software start this way? I think a big part of it is just that it's hard. We talked about how it's hard to write a text editor, but what if you now need to write a text editor and image editor, a video editor and... See more
No one cares about software quality anymore. I mean, yes technically that is untrue and there are demonstrably some people who do, but for the most part, quality software has become a niche luxury while the most commonly-used software has become a slow, laborious cesspool.
Privacy and security in this world mostly means “which private company do you trust with your safety?” The answer often coincides with who has the largest walls and deepest moats.
ITEs are probably a subset of notes apps, just like IDEs are a subset of text editors. Every IDE is fundamentally a text editor. Every ITE is fundamentally a notes app. That’s because—at least for now—the best way we have of working with our thoughts is to instantiate them as notes.
This idea of hovering, of epistemological hovering, and messiness, and incompleteness, and not everything ties up into a neat bow, and you're really not on a journey here. You're here for some messy reason or reasons, and maybe you don't know what it is, and maybe I don't know what it is!