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Comment by calambrac | Hacker News Reader

The demo video isn't even up yet, and you're already dismissing it for what you think it doesn't take into account? You're my new hero.

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Hey now, I'm saying that the claim of a central "THIS IS THE BEST WAY" communication is flawed, because there are lots of ways to communicate.

I based what I wrote on the two articles that got posted to HN, and gave my initial impression.

Except that's not really what you said.

You said "This is silly, it doesn't account for the many, many axes of communication".

Then you listed these axes without explaining how they weren't accounted for.

Then you reduced the product to "screw email, it's a chat! With Widgets!".

Then you listed out a bunch of existing products that actually don't account for all the axes of communication.

And then admitted towards the end of all that that you actually "have no idea how it fits well into the framework of communication types".

All without having ever used the product, or having any exposure to it besides reading two short articles about it.

Meh, not going to argue with you over a product neither of us have ever used. You're right, I took stronger than needed stances, and it's most likely that this will be a very cool technology. I am just pointing out that all-in-one tools don't really solve communication problems, and that there is a ton to consider when talking about how information is presented, stored, and discussed between people.

Didn't RSS readers solve a problem by aggregating disparate streams? Granted, the problem is a lot bigger here. Instead of aggregating/organizing lots of sources using only 2 protocols, you are trying to do the same for many protocols and many models. But I suspect this is why it would be a big win -- the users find this daunting as well!

all-in-one does solve the problem of moving a conversation between all the different and incompatible existing systems. seamless integration is a huge win.

This was the biggest takeaway for me too. It's a way of easily moving data from just about any communication system to just about any other communication system.

Do you think it will really be seamless? That's where almost all of these types of all-in-one deals fail for me. They are completely seamless if you want to play by the rules they set and the interfaces they build. When you want to break out of that mold they're not really so seamless anymore. I know it's an open protocol and blah blah but I'm not sure I want to spend all this time making a screwdriver into a hammer when I already have a perfectly fine hammer.

The demo video isn't even up yet, and some people are already calling it the future of communication. This looks like one of Google's narrow-minded tactic to sideline Bing's news today.

What are you talking about? Google IO is going on, you expected them to just sit around and have a big circle chat about Bing? If anything, Microsoft is trying to sideline Google. Big companies compete for the spotlight, get over it.

Well the demo video is up now and I believe MS's Bing is pale, very pale in comparison.

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