If big names and bold ambitions predicted success, then the new partnership between David Allen, the personal productivity guru and author of “Getting Things Done,†and Intentional Software would surely be a winner. The goal: to help organize a person's digital life
Intentional Software was founded a decade ago by Charles Simonyi, a software wizard and an early hire at Microsoft, who oversaw the design of its Office productivity applications. Recently, Mr. Simonyi is probably best known as a billionaire space tourist, having twice taken rides on the Soyuz spacecraft.
Yet Mr. Simonyi's greatest achievements are in computing. His pedigree goes back before Microsoft. In the 1970s, Mr. Simonyi, who holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, was a member of the group at Xerox PARC that largely invented modern personal computing. He wrote a word processor called Bravo that displayed text on a computer screen as it would appear when printed on page - a breakthrough technique at the time, dubbed WYSIWYG, What You See Is What Your Get. Bravo would become Microsoft Word.
The company, based in Bellevue, Wash., sprang from Mr. Simonyi's research at Microsoft on “intentional programming,†clever software that better understands what a user wants to do, his or her intentions. That goal has been around since the beginning of software. FORTRAN, the first successful, higher-level programming language was designed to let engineers and scientists write programs in a vernacular that closely resembled math formulas familiar to them. FORTRAN is an abbreviation for FORmula TRANslator.
But intentional programming, in its ultimate vision, would be a big step above programming languages - essentially allowing people to tell machines what computing tasks they want done. If this sounds like science fiction to you, you have plenty of company among the skeptics.
Whether Intentional Software is an intriguing research venture or a real c ompany is an unanswered question. Its work has attracted a couple of contracts from Darpa, the Pentagon's advanced research agency, and some private-sector projects.
Eric Anderson, a software engineer, entrepreneur and chairman of Space Adventures, a space tourism pioneer, was recruited to Intentional Software less than two years ago. His mission is to find wider markets for the company's technology.
Mr. Anderson, a devotee of the Getting Things Done regimen, got in touch with Mr. Allen and explained the potential of Intentional Software's technology as a “meta-tool†to help organize a person's digital life.
Mr. Allen was intrigued and both sides eventually agreed to pursue the opportunity, with a partnership announced on Wednesday. Mr. Allen describes the company's software as “a solution looking for the right problem.â€
The partnership, said Mr. Anderson, will design software that sits on top of a person's digital calendar and communications including e-mail, text messages, Facebook and Twitter feeds. Then, the software will automatically apply the G.T.D. principles of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reviewing and prioritizing the various channels of information in a person's life.
“This could be as transformative to the way people work as Microsoft Office has been,†Mr. Anderson.
But every person would be able to tailor the behavior of the software for individual priorities, like work chores filtered by what is immediate and what is important.
Flexibility, Mr. Allen says, is crucial to avoid the pitfall of most software, which he refers to as “Naziware.†What is needed, he said, is “an orientation tool. Right now, the computer is not an orientation tool - it's a disorientation tool.â€
The partnership plans to crowdsource the design of the new productivity software. It is hoping to tap ideas from the many Getting Things Done fans about what they want to see in a super-produc tivity product and be beta testers for experimental versions of the software. And Intentional Software has set up a Web site for interested individuals and corporations, www.intentsoft.com/gtd
A timetable for shipping a product? Too soon to say precisely, Mr. Anderson said, though probably in a year or so. “This isn't going to be years and years,†he said.
Still, an
