calendars and work life balance
So many ways to slice the world up: why is xyz happening? The answer depends on how you slice it. You could say xyz is happening because of class, or race, or gender, or coke vs pepsi. Some concepts work better at slicing than others, some fail quickly (the simple existence of rc cola refutes one concept already). The one concept that just keeps on succeeding for me these days is male/female. It's not really on my mind, it's just when it comes down to interpreting events it make a pretty clean slice.
Let's take this request from Ray Ozzie last year for some progress on standards and functionality with calendaring. I found it by way of this post by Westin who's a SharePoint guy. The upshot is that some stuff has happened, mostly by the iCalendar team, and some stuff has stalled. The dream of integrated calendaring is still - might I say MORE - elusive than anything else that might need integrated (media files, contact lists, e-mail). The reason why I say it's MORE elusive is the gender factor. Calendaring is the major tool for solving work life balance issues. It's all you have to work with, really, mapping out your time because as everyone knows it's finite on a daily as well as lifetime basis.
So, in order to put Calendaring on the front burner in terms of development, it has to be a need recognized as urgent by the startup developers with the idea. I can't tell you how many times people have told me there is no business case for integrated Calendaring, choosing instead to pursue other items to integrate instead. That fact, combined with my assertion that men are less sensitive to work life issues in general, (someone please refute me!) leads me to say: Calendaring integration will likely only be solved by a female developer. And that, is why the solution is so far away.