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