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
The main languages out of which web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source... the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.
The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.
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.
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.
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.