Mitch Kapor
Mitch Kapor
Mitchell David Kapor, born November 1, 1950, is an entrepreneur best known for promoting the first spreadsheet VisiCalc, and later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes, like the Hidden Genius Project, The...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth1 November 1950
CountryUnited States of America
I think there are questions about whether there will continue to be a real basis for innovation and open platforms. If they don't permit true innovation and true openness, it will not provide maximum benefit to the people.
I'd acutely felt the lack of a product that I really loved, but there was a tremendous lack of commercial opportunity to start software ventures around these ideas, given the industry's structure, and I did a lot of thinking about how things might be put together, learned a lot about open source, made a pilgrimage to go see Linus, and tried to educate myself.
The computer environment is radically different today. In the 1980s, it was like the Wild West, with a lot of open territory. Now, the cowboys have moved out and the farmers have moved in.
It is possible to take a population of students who are failing and whose schools are failing them, who are being written off as not being college material, and if they have the right support, they can all go to college and succeed.
I think there is widespread agreement that there is a crisis in public education.
Jazz was a bomb. That was also the low point of Mac sales. People had just written it off.
I routinely failed to understand that 'simple and straightforward' would have been a much better product strategy for Lotus.
People are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.
Well, I was fortunate enough to be able to self-fund to start, but I had no intention of self-funding forever, and so I needed a model that would be sustainable.
I tell people that the history of Mozilla and Firefox is so one of a kind that it should not be used - ever - as an example of what's possible.
Managerial and professional people hadn't really used computers, hadn't sat down at keyboards, until personal computers. Personal computers have a totally different feel.
There are a lot of similarities between cyberspace and the frontier. It's pretty raw and primitive. I mean, you have to churn your own butter in cyberspace. You can't go down to the 7-Eleven and buy a stick of butter because it's not that well developed.
Microsoft represents the best of ourselves or the worst.
People in the industry foresee a time in which, for many people, the only thing they'll need on a computer is a browser.