Er, Anyone Heard of BlackBerry?
Multi-calendaring was solved by BlackBerry yonks ago, specifically with BlackBerry Balance. From what I heard, when well set up it was a very good approach to managing and living with personal and professional calendars. It was so good, no one understood it and so very few went for it...
But that's just chicken feed. There's way more to calendaring than simply having a single view of what events you're supposed to be at. I recall reading about IBM Profs, dating from the 1980s. This mainframe hosted office solution (email, calendar) knew all about the art of having a meetings. Supposedly, some installations of it were set up so that if someone required your attendance at another site, Profs would book you the necessary transportation and hotel accomodation and also knew how long this would all take, and how long the returns would take for the next appointment. Thus, organising a meeting with Bob, Alice and Frankie was simply a case of inviting them; Profs did everything else to ensure that all participants had the travel docs they needed and the time allowed for it, automatically.
That was the 1980s.
What's gone wrong of course is that the creators of all the more recent efforts have focused on straightforward calendar apps like that solves all the problems, rather than ask "why do we have calendars, and why are they important?".
Google nearly went down this sort of route; they started up some sort of travel coordination application, the emergence of which caused Worldmate to abandon BlackBerry Travel (something along the lines of "we're going to get swamped by a big tech bully, no point competing"). But of course Google lost interest and shuttered the project, leaving the world with nothing. Blackberry travel was fabulous, understanding flights, hire cars, hotels, and being glued into all the important data sources related to "travel".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
