Curiouser and Curiouser!

Lisp really is a fascinating language.  When I read Paul Graham talking about Arc and CLOS thus:

I personally have never needed object-oriented abstractions. Common Lisp has an enormously powerful object system and I've never used it once. I've done a lot of things (e.g. making hash tables full of closures) that would have required object-oriented techniques to do in wimpier languages, but I have never had to use CLOS.

At first I was inclined to dismiss it, after all lots of people denigrate OOP or say they don't need it.  However already I can kind of see what he means.

I'm just running through tutorials at the moment, messing with functions and closures and messing with lists of functions and lists of data and...  Well, lets just say it's opening some new pathways.

I still like Java, I'm still happy to code in Java, but I'm definitely enjoying Lisp and wonder about where it might take me.

Interesting, I just post about Wiki and here I read that the SocialText crew (Adina Levin, Ross Mayfield, Peter Kaminski, and Ed Vielmetti) are releasing a Wiki product of their own called NiceLittleWiki.  I hope it will solve some of the current problems with Wiki software (ugliness, impossible media handling, lack of ability to format text when you need it, bad indexing, etc...).

SocialText may turn out to be one of the Purple Cows of KM.  I await their next move with interest!

(With thanks to Terry for reminding me about SocialText)

I've been reading In Praise of the Purple Cow in which the author, Seth Godin, proposes that, in order to be truly successful, a product must be remarkable.  His claim is that being very good is also failure.  These days everyone is good or very good, you have to be remarkable to stand out and get the notices (good and bad).

The purple cow idea jives very much with what I've read of Gary Hamel's notion of how revolutionary approaches create new markets and deliver profits.  Unless you also invest in new purple cows then building upon success is the road to stagnation.  Ask AOL, Palm and Yahoo.  This idea feels right to me.

Which lead me to thinking about knowledge management products and how so many of them are good, but hardly remarkable.  Personal Brain is a remarkable product which was never exploited.   The Wiki idea was remarkable, but none of the Wiki software I've used has been.  In fact when I think about it, the whole field of KM is dominated by the idea of being good enough.

For example OpenText Livelink is a very successful KM product.  Which gives you some idea of the state of that market.  Livelink is a well-dressed document management system.  Hardly innovative, definitely not purple cow territory.  But it's been successful.  Why is that?

I think the answer is partly about OpenText being an aggressive sales driven company, partly that the KM market is dominated by large, conservative, corporations, and partly because the whole market is ripe, waiting for a real purple cow.

Can anyone say "Moo!?!"