If, like Alan Kay, you think we need a major overhaul in software construction and are in the San Francisco Bay Area, let me know. I'm part of a group that meets on Saturdays once a month and we work on side research projects toward that end. My email is in my profile.
If anyone in the Boston area is interested in whiteboarding high-skill software development environments in the context of 2018/2019 hardware, I'd be interested. So: continuous speech recognition; hand tracking, controllers, and haptic exoskeletons, but still keyboards; HMDs with 30+ px/deg, and eye tracking, but still screens.
Dynabook was a nice vision. As always, society executed poorly, and failed to realize much of the potential of its technologies. No doubt that will happen again with VR/AR. For example, there's a toxic cauldron of patents brewing. Screens and keyboards and mice, have had a good half-century run. And GUIs, and personal local hardware. But perhaps time to shift focus.
I don't understand - are you suggesting the only way to know you could have done something better, is to see someone else doing the same thing for comparison? That's certainly one way. Others include... all the ways you evaluate the execution of a company or project, when you don't have a direct competitor to compare it with, no?
Maybe you would agree with the statement "reality is broken"? I certainly don't think it's meaningful.
The unfortunate associations of wanting society to "execute better" (i.e. the merger of industry and the state found under fascism) just underline the fact that applying performance measurements to human life/social phenomena is misguided. We don't all agree on the purpose of life or the nature of happiness, nor should we.
