Mitch Kapor starts stuff.
In 1982 he founded Lotus Development Corp. and got the spreadsheet business going in a big way with Lotus 1-2-3 -- although his favorite product was one that came along much later. It was a personal information manager called Agenda. More about that in a moment.
In 1990 Kapor and John Perry Barlow co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Later Kapor became a venture capitalist. He was a founding investor in UUNET and Real Networks, and has invested in other startups, including Groove Networks and Eazel.
His latest effort is another nonprofit: Open Source Applications Foundation <http://osafoundation.org>. Unveiled in October, OSAF is chartered to help finish commoditizing the productivity suites without which Linux On The Desktop (LOTD) will remain less than a market winner.
"I am convinced that, with or without OSAF, the existing class of applications like Microsoft Office will be fully commoditized and free within five years," he says. And he wants to make that happen. Not because he wants to come up with an "Outlook killer," as some have claimed; but because he sees an opportunity to do what he loves, which is make productivity software.
ASOF's first product is called Chandler (after Raymond), and its ancestry is clear to Yoz Grahame, who writes:
The feature summary looks like a standard-issue email client until you hit the bullet points at the bottom:
Those features go way beyond what most PIMs offer today, yet they come from a 15-year-old DOS program. Chandler's true daddy is the PIM that Kapor delivered to the market in the 80's: Lotus Agenda.
Agreeing with Grahame, Kapor said, "the spirit of Agenda is going to animate Chandler."
And if the open source development community wants to help finish commoditizing the basic office suite, they'll help animate Chandler too.
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