What software should be
It’s very interesting living during the mid-Triassic period of the computer age. Industrialization was a bigh thing. It took culture over a 100 years to kind of “get it”. Look at cars. The first ones were called “horseless carriages”, because that’s exactly what they were. It took some time for someone to figure out that, once the horses were gone, you could change the carriage in new and interesting ways. The carriage was no longer defined, in part, by the horse.
Computers are like that now. What do you do with one? Well, you can make it act like a bunch of information handling things: typewriter, darkroom, printing press, music player, movie theater. This is all neat. But this is all stuff that the computer replaces. The computer will come into its own when it does things that are analogous to *nothing* else.
John C. Fox is founder & CEO of [GroupSmarts, LLC](http://www.memoryminer.com/mmlanding “GroupSmarts website”), publisher of MemoryMiner software. MemoryMiner does something that only a computer and network infrastructure can do. It is billed as “Digital Storytelling Software”. True enough. But the cool thing about it is that the story can be linear or non-linear, can use and connect multiple media, web services, and is designed to be Internet publishable.
This is what software should be. John Fox “gets it.” What MemoryMiner does can only be done by computer. There is simply no easy analog to it. It doesn’t “replace” a story book. This is a step out of the Triassic. Thank you, John.