I was there (you'll find my name in the Wired article), and on the whole I would agree that Xanadu's reach far exceeded its grasp. Compared to the simplicity of the http protocol, Xanadu's complexity was high enough and its performance low enough that there was little opportunity for a genuine competition.
But I will say that Xanadu was conceptually not centralized; the peer-to-peer exchange of arbitrary information at scale was definitely part of the architecture. However, the major and systemic performance problems entirely prevented any scaling up of the system, which effectively means the distributed architecture was never proven.
I agree to a certain extent with the Chandler analogy, insofar as there was a lot of "architecture astronautics" that added complexity to the system beyond the ability of the team to manage -- especially given the limitations of early 1990s development machines.
One could refer to the article itself for Walker's own view of the sad outcome:
'Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.
'“When this process fails,” wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, “and it always does, that doesn’t seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It’s always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc.—precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place.”'
He wasn't wrong. Xanadu tried to leap fully formed into the world as a megalithic architecture capable of arbitrarily large data structures supporting arbitrarily small comparisons and transclusions, and it couldn't compete with HTTP's fully open specification and implementations, low barrier to entry, and extreme simplicity.
I appreciate the boots-on-the-ground perspective, so thanks for posting! I do want to be clear that I do appreciate the research and enjoy reading the papers produced by Xanadu. My goal was never to belittle the project itself, just talk about reasons for history playing out as it did.
No worries, I didn't interpret your comment as belittlement. I agree the project was over-ambitious and overly complex, but it was also visionary and influential.
But I will say that Xanadu was conceptually not centralized; the peer-to-peer exchange of arbitrary information at scale was definitely part of the architecture. However, the major and systemic performance problems entirely prevented any scaling up of the system, which effectively means the distributed architecture was never proven.
I agree to a certain extent with the Chandler analogy, insofar as there was a lot of "architecture astronautics" that added complexity to the system beyond the ability of the team to manage -- especially given the limitations of early 1990s development machines.
One could refer to the article itself for Walker's own view of the sad outcome:
'Rather than push their product into the marketplace quickly, where it could compete, adapt, or die, the Xanadu programmers intended to produce their revolution ab initio.
'“When this process fails,” wrote Walker in his collection of documents from and about Autodesk, “and it always does, that doesn’t seem to weaken the belief in a design process which, in reality, is as bogus as astrology. It’s always a bad manager, problems with tools, etc.—precisely the unpredictable factors which make a priori design impossible in the first place.”'
He wasn't wrong. Xanadu tried to leap fully formed into the world as a megalithic architecture capable of arbitrarily large data structures supporting arbitrarily small comparisons and transclusions, and it couldn't compete with HTTP's fully open specification and implementations, low barrier to entry, and extreme simplicity.