4 ms·

MIT has plently of hackers that could just roll their own. The most suprising part is that they didn't do that, and just went with the packaged solution.

• trapper 17y ago
  You think that the worlds best minds are spent building a calendar?
  • garply 17y ago
    Why not? They could make a hell of a calendar.
  • sanj 17y ago
    Having spent a decade at MIT, I'd be happy to place somewhere in the middle of that pack. And I'm building a better calendar.
• eob 17y ago
  You'd be surprised at how much home-grown stuff we run around here (I'm a grad student at MIT). All of the school-owned computers still run Athena OS, everyone uses Kerberos, emacs still rules the day..I once saw a secretary use the `finger` command to look up a phone number and couldn't believe it. The problem is all the home-grown stuff is inevitably pretty low-level compared to today's solutions. Sure, there are plenty of hackers around to build OSS replacements for all our needs, but these hackers are students and professors: their main job is to do research, not implement enterprise software. So I think the decision to move to outlook was probably based on the simple fact that it offers a lot of nice features that we don't currently have.
• pxlpshr 17y ago
  we just had a debate on this a week or two ago on HN. the eternal optimism of a hacker is usually a sign of inexperience, imo. so sure, a few MIT students could "roll their own" in 12-18+ months. It likely still won't be as feature complete nor user friendly, and they spent 25% of their university time re-inventing the wheel.