IP: Former Lotus guru Mitch Kapor speaks out

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Thu, 1 Jun 2000 16:05:37 -0400
> To: farber () central cis upenn edu (David Farber)
> From: Jean Armour Polly <mom () netmom com>
>
> complete article here
> http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/zd/20000601/tc/former_lotus_guru_mitch_ 
> kapor_speaks_out_1.html
>
> Thursday June 01 01:15 PM EDT
>
> Former Lotus guru Mitch Kapor speaks out
>
> By Charles Cooper, ZDNet News
>
> Mitch Kapor does the vision thing -- and he has a scary message.
>
> Mitch Kapor was a big deal back in the 1980s when he ran Lotus Development 
> Corp., a software company that was the Microsoft of its day. He was good 
> copy, too. A former teacher of transcendental meditation with a studied 
> fondness for appearing in public in wild, Hawaiian pastel shirts, Kapor 
> could sling quotes with the best of them -- and in fact, he was better at 
> the game than his major cross-country rival, a still rather raw Bill Gates.
> <snip>
> But Kapor frets about where the important research will get done. The 
> great industrial development shops, such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, have 
> shifted gears to pursue different charters. Speaking from experience, 
> Kapor notes that the angel investors are put off by ventures that are too 
> risky with so little prospect of immediate return. "The average VC is 
> looking to get a company to market within six to 12 months and see it make 
> money within a couple of
> years," he says.
>
> A call to arms?
>
> Coming from one of the charter members of the capitalist computer class, 
> Kapor complains about what he described as a "serious under-investment" in 
> serious technology. Instead, he frets about a concomitant over-investment 
> in e-commerce. "If we don't fund institutions to do basic research on 
> these issues, we won't make a lot of progress," he says.
> <snip>
> complete article at URL above