Editor’s note: Russ McGuire is the online director of Business Reform Magazine. Each issue of Business Reform features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.
Chandler is still an embryo in its mother’s womb. And yet many open source hearts are leaping at Chandler’s future promise. No, Chandler is not the second coming of Christ, although some seem apt to worship Chandler. The Chandler of which I speak isn’t even a person. It’s simply a piece of software. And yet, Chandler may be just the savior that the open source community needs to resurrect hopes for Linux as the dominant desktop environment.
Enough double-speak. What is Chandler? According to the website of the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF), Chandler “is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) intended for use in everyday information and communication tasks, such as composing and reading email, managing an appointment calendar and keeping a contact list.” That doesn’t sound too exciting and certainly not world-changing. There are plenty of products that do a perfectly credible job as a PIM, most notably Microsoft’s Outlook, which dominates the market.
What makes Chandler so exciting is how the product is being designed. The vision for Chandler goes way beyond how e-mails and contact information and calendar events are stored and displayed. The Chandler vision incorporates all kinds of information, including typical PIM objects, as well as any kind of document (such as spreadsheets, presentations, and text documents) and any form of communications (such as instant messaging channels and blogs). More than just collecting these items, Chandler integrates them in ways that make sense for the individual – allowing the user to compile folders and subfolders on given topics that incorporate any and all of the above objects. Even more powerfully, Chandler enables the controlled sharing and publishing of these objects so that formal and ad hoc teams can efficiently and effectively work together.
All of this is great. If the OSAF delivers what it has promised, then Chandler should be a successful product.
And yet, it really is more than that. Chandler’s greatness does not stem from its feature set or even the strength of the team that is developing it. Chandler could change the world because it finally breaks free of the existing paradigms for user interfaces and attempts to reinvent the entire mechanism by which people harness the power of computers to meet their needs.
In other words, if Chandler is successful, it could truly make Microsoft’s Windows irrelevant.
Until now, all open source desktop development has sought to be “as good as” Windows and as similar to Microsoft’s product as possible. Chandler starts outside of that framework and reaches beyond it.
Don’t worry, I’m not as confused as you think I am. Chandler is neither an operating system, nor is it a desktop environment. It’s only an application that will run on multiple operating systems (including Windows, Apple’s OS X, and Linux).
But Chandler’s vision does incorporate many of the benefits that we currently attribute to Microsoft’s Windows environment. And if I believe what is being promised, then Chandler will make these attributes work much better and much more intuitively than Windows does.
In short, a desktop computer running Linux, Chandler, and a handful of other open source applications, promises to be easier for the novice to learn and yet more powerful for the expert to use than a computer running Windows, Outlook, and Office. And I believe that this must be true for Linux to truly displace Windows on the desktop.
You see, I tend to be more of a computer power user. Since I’ve used Unix operating systems for nearly 20 years, I enjoy being able to jump to the command line on my desktop Linux system to perform sophisticated functions, like global search and replace on an entire collection of documents. But even for a power user like me, the fact that I have to turn to the command line to perform simple tasks that are a mere mouse click away on my Windows desktop slows me down, and no one likes to be slowed down. Furthermore, I would not recommend Linux in its current state to a novice computer user.
But Chandler, by itself, may change that. Chandler may be the tool that brings efficiency and effectiveness to power users like me. Chandler may also prove so intuitive that novices can more quickly get up to speed with typical activities on an open source platform than on a Microsoft platform. That, by itself would be amazing.
And yet, I hope for even more. I hope that Chandler will usher in a whole new mindset in the open source community. “As good as” is not good enough. To overtake the leader, open source developers must strive to reach beyond, to imagine that which has not yet been achieved, and to deliver benefits that have not yet been realized by others.
Chandler is still early in its gestation period. The early ultrasound readings are still pretty fuzzy. The parents have announced expected delivery late in 2004, so we still have a lot of waiting to do. But excitement level is high, and many hopeful eyes are pinning high hopes on Chandler’s future.
Russ McGuire is Online Director for Business Reform. Prior to joining Business
Reform, Mr. McGuire spent over twenty years in technology industries, performing various roles from writing mission critical software for the nuclear power and defense industries to developing core business strategies in the telecom industry. Mr. McGuire is currently focused on helping businesspeople apply God’s eternal truths to their real-world business challenges through Business Reform’s online services. He can be reached at [email protected].
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