Interesting blog post - comments anyone?

[Richmond Mathewson]

On 11/30/09 7:13 PM, Randall Reetz wrote:
> I mean ANY form of loyalty.  ALL LOYALTY is based on the perception of belonging which is always defined by exclusivity.  It is the friendly face put on every negative trait exhibited by humans: nepitism, racism, sexism, religious and every other form of superiority.  Nobody joins a group to assert their equality with those not of the group.  Though we are often fooled, cool-aid is cool-aid, no matter how long it has been aged.  A simple commitment to truth is a much more moral (fair) alternative.  That and compassion.
>
> It would be instructive here to place run-rev in historical and genealogical perspective.  In 1987 apple introduced a product based on the genius of smalltalk that it called hypercard.  A few years later, when apple failed to keep hypercard modern, supercard brought color to the xtalk family.  When supercard ignored the other platforms (windows and unix), metacard came to the rescue.  What back-room finagleing prompted the metacard people to change their name to "run time revolution" the single most awkward product name in the history of product names, god only knows.  But here we are.  And it is good to remember that the real genius of the entire lineage of programming tools was based upon the insights of two men, alan kay (smalltalk, objects and message passing) and bill atkinson (the simplification of the object stack to a few predefined layers, and a wysiwyg interface).  Nothing done since has been anything but standard version, product management, and customer relations.  Not to diminish the importance of or difficulty keeping a product current and supporting customers, but the real value of xtalk IP was handed free of charge to everyone after apple and owes much to the work of alan kay 30 years earlier.
>
> Lets keep some perspective here.  If rev wants loyalty, then at the very least they should share it with the guys who invented all of the stuff it brags about in its sales pitches.   Cause almost none of it was naively derived at "run time revolution".
>
>    
Good Lord! After a long day's teaching I thought I would wind down by 
reading the Use-List posting - and it starts
with a real headache-causer from RR (the other one, not RunRev).