Are we having fun yet

Haven’t had time to blog in over a month. Actually I did have a series of vacation days in December but you know how those tend to play out with a startup
. It has been an entertaining attempt getting through a seemingly endless pile of holiday season blog posts.

I agree for the most part with Adam Bosworth’s We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We
have been building on the foundations of others for generations, no industry can argue against this. We’re lazy software developers, why would we want to
re-implement memory management routines or layout managers. Sure this is required in some situations, but for the most part we should be encouraging re-u
se. There’s a reason why Java and C# have been successful, they make developer’s lives easier by providing an extensive foundation framework. In my most
recent experience, we wouldn’t be successful if we couldn’t leverge the work of others. It speeds development and increases the likelyhood that a young
companies is able to market (in a timely and anticipated fashion).

I don’t think it’s the job of a corporation to “give back” in a way dictated by any one group of end users. Google is out to make a profit, and a side-eff
ect of them making this profit is providing web searches, desktop searches, newsgroup searches, library searches….you name it. Likewise for the Yahoo’s,
Jeeves and even MS searches. Should we expect the employees of these companies to give back to the communities? It would be nice but I’d be happy with c
ontinued innovation in the respective fields of expertise and the continued availability of free services.

Hey Google, I’m tired of paying for software X, can you buy that company and make the software free…. Would be nice wouldn’t it.