Slashdot Mirror

Our microscopic image processing software uses pi to considerable precision. This is, I admit, a pretty specialized application.

[wearily] My site runs the entire business flow of the company I work for, everything from lead management to financials to supply chain to shipping. We ship some pretty damn complex stuff, which requires managing a great deal of data to get the product out the door. If you think what I do is playing with toys because of my choice of platform ... y'know, I have to wonder how many mainframe programmers there were, back in the day, who sneered at people who wrote software for those little "toy" PC's.

My company sells digital microscopy systems -- microscope, camera, Mac or PC workstation, capture and image processing software, and assorted other goodies -- which typically run between $75,000 and $250,000. Now, I don't know if our customers would like to be described as "ordinary scientists" <g> but we do sell plenty of systems. Academic customers usually pay with grant money, of course; corporate (mostly pharmaceutical) customers just write a check ... In any case, there are plenty of scientists who have access to that level of funding.

Because the vast bulk of paid software development is done in-house to solve specific business problems, IMO free software creates more jobs than it destroys. My company can afford to pay me a decent salary in large part because they don't have to pay Oracle or Microsoft a fortune for proprietary tools that offer little if any advantage over the free tools I use.

You're right, if you "wrote an open-source implementation of the core software in your company," I'd be SOL. But that's unlikely, because the software we sell is very specialized, requiring a great deal of technical knowledge to create, sell, and maintain. (And, for that matter, use.) It's a hell of a lot easier to find OSS developers for a DBMS, OS, general-purpose programming language, or Web server than for image processing and management software specific to microscopic images. This, IMO, is the future of proprietary software: niche-market apps which require specialized knowledge to produce will continue to command a premium, while general-purpose apps such as OS's and DBMS's will increasingly tend to be free.

Actually, that works for institutional (corporate / academic / government / etc.) customers as well. The company I work for doesn't generally sell to individual users -- not a whole lot of people at Best Buy shopping for $100,000+ digital microscopy systems. ;) But we do try to establish a good relationship with the individuals who are making purchasing decisions at the labs (mostly university and pharmaceutical co., some and government) who are making the decision to buy one of our products.

If you show a serious interest in buying one of our systems, you get a quote which is good for a specified time period. That quote will be itemized to any degree you want. If you order the system we've quoted within that time period, you get exactly what we said we'd deliver, at exactly the price we told we'd charge. If the quote expires, and the price on the system or any of its components has changes, we'll tell you what changed and why.

This approach is the main reason, IMO, that we've seen ~600% growth in the last five years.

The truth is that both ideas are ultimately feeding on the free market as the source of their power. Dammit, I want to live in a world with out these friggin' overlords and uber men around every corner. A free market with small companies still looks like the best of all worlds to me.

Well, I think the size of the mirror used might make it impractical for a soldier to carry one of these things around in a pair of goggles. ;) Also, it's a lot harder to apply adaptive optical techniques to lenses than to mirrors -- I work for a microscopy company (not as an optical engineer, granted, but that's what a lot of my coworkers do, and I hear them bitching) and we've had a hell of a time applying adaptive optical techniques to anything -- we have one product based on this idea that's only started shipping this year. I suspect the problems with lens-based telescopes and binoculars would be even worse, since the lenses in question are so much bigger.

That being said, I would be very surprised if there weren't military spy satellites, and perhaps reconnaisance planes, already using this.

The difference is that, as a government contractor, you need discipline. This is very hard to come by in the dot-com world of lax business.

[Shrug] I moved from working in Big Healthcare (US Air Force medic, then Denver Health, then Kaiser) to Small Software (my current employer) and there was no difference in the discipline needed. In all circumstances, as long as I showed up and did my job, I got paid. Granted, the penalties for not doing my job were a bit worse in the USAF -- I could go to jail for not going to work, as opposed to just being fired -- but for someone with a good work ethic, it doesn't really matter. You go to work and you do your job. Everything else is details.