Jesus, man, I ran into Mitchell Kapor in an organic grocery store and he was fresh from his sweat yoga class, carrying his mat and smelling like ass and going on about how great his Chandler application is going to be. I was like, Dude, if I have to hear about this friggin Chandler thing one more time I’m gonna get a gun and start shooting people. Mitch, you’re a nice guy, and I know you like to hang out with techies and act like some big visionary, but look, just admit it, you don’t know how to write software, okay? And you’re great at starting projects but you never finish anything. You got lucky in the Eighties with Lotus but only because a) you stole the idea from Visicalc; and b) other people wrote the code for you; and c) because there was no competition. Once Microsoft developed Excel, 1-2-3 was toast. But now you’re out here acting like some kind of friggin tech industry guru. Gawd.

How long have you been working on Chandler? Five years? And what’s the status today? You’re in version .6, for Christ’s sake. I just checked the OSAF website and read the FAQ on Chandler. I’m sorry but this description is one of the most inadvertently hilarious things I’ve ever read on a website:

“Chandler is a next-generation Personal Information Manager (PIM), integrating calendar, email, contact management, task management, notes, and instant messaging functions. So far, in Chandler 0.6, we have the calendar functions experimentally usable but none of the others to the same level yet.”

Dude, it’s a friggin email client with some calendaring and contact management. Why the hell can you bozos not make this work? This is becoming the biggest running joke in the industry. What makes it worse is that this isn’t a five-year-old project. It’s 20 years old. Mitchell has been dicking around trying to make a “PIM” since 1986. In those days he called it “Agenda.” He couldn’t finish that one, either.

Check out the OSAF’s Chandler FAQs which I don’t think are meant to be as nut-bustingly funny as they are. Like:

When will OSAF ship Chandler? (Ship? Who said anything about shipping?)

Who are Chandler’s main competitors? (Um, great question. None so far.)

What platforms does Chandler run on? (For now, an overhead projector.)

For another good belly laugh, read this post from Mitchell’s weblog back in October 2002 — that’s not a typo — where Mitchell assures the world that Chandler is not “an Outlook killer.” Whew. Huge sigh of relief up in Redmond on that one, I’m sure.

Mitchell’s 2002 blog post was a response to this CNET story which began with the question: “Can a fledgling nonprofit organization with half a dozen employees challenge the largest software company in the world?”

Guess we’ve got our answer.