The publisher (sorry, I can't find your name on the site) of Microdoc news, was a little more affronted by Tom Coate's use of the term amateur than I was. He does go on to suggest empowerment as an alternate explanation of the trend the Coate described in his post. I like empowerment better - it's got a much more positive connotation, but it still doesn't quite feel right. Empowerment has still got the corporate fad of the week feeling stuck to it. At least for me. And it doesn't explain why people are starting to do this stuff. Or in the words of Morpheus "Someday you're going to find out that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."

[ via Hack the Planet ] Brad Hutchings wrote a retrospective on Be. Whenever I think of Be I think of the following incident:

During the time that I was in Apple's Newton Group, one of my colleagues in the OS group was fooling around with alternate operating systems on Mac hardware. I remember the first time I ever saw BeOS live. Herman had just installed it on his machine, which was a PowerMac 9500 (I can't remember if it was a dual, all I remember was that I was jealous because he had a PowerMac, I was still creaking along on a 68K (yes, unbelievably, there was a shortage of PowerMac hardware inside Apple). Anyway, I still remember standing there as he booted the machine into BeOS. He and I just looked at each other, kind of stunned, because all of a sudden we realized how fast the PowerMac hardware actually was. We never actually saw all the performance becase MacOS was still doing mixed mode switches due to emulation, and Rhapsody was carrying a lot of UNIX bloat. After the surprise wore off, sadness/depression set in, as we realized that we were probably never going to see the PowerMac hardware utilized to the fullest.

But as we all know by now, the best technology doesn't always win.