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Comment on Alan Kay on re-creating Xerox PARC's design magic at CDGparent

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Inertia, Communication, Noise.

The landscape is very different from what it was in 70s. They were working on a clean slate before half of the human population had computer terminals in front of them. Their battle was to get the terminal in front of people, but I'd argue that the biggest accelerator to adoption has been social media, not the way GUIs behave or programming languages function. The web is now the legacy software we're stuck with if we want any impact at this scale.

Say for example, if you had a completely new idea for a general purpose operating system which simplified things greatly, but was unlike Unix, and it had no web browser. Now what? People aren't interested - they want their web browser.

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