Named at Microsoft in 1991. Still the claim.
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Jonathan Hare's name, at Microsoft, for the missing layer: a coordination substrate above applications and below business practice, which would let processes span organizations without being re-implemented at every boundary.
He identified it in 1991, chose it in 1993 as the hardest remaining problem, and spent the next thirty-three years on it. Organic Technology, Business DNA, Sitelets, the Consilient architecture and the Quantum Privacy Network are all successive attempts at the same thing.
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Traveling through India, the Maldives and Sri Lanka, he concluded that population and affluence were locked terms and technology the only free one — and that commercial self-interest would lay the fiber long before charity would. What remained unsolved was a global decentralized market for all resources, including human capability. He chose it deliberately as the hardest remaining problem, on the grounds that the others were well suited to existing capital markets and this one was not.
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The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-180The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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