The Economist's Open-Source Quintet

LarsWestergren writes "The latest issue of The Economist has an interesting group of articles on software, including The Beast of Complexity, Open Source, Sun, Microsoft and the Battle of the (next generation) Platforms, XML alphabet soup, and Software Integration. Not technical, in-depth or error free, but still a good overview, and a hint of what the suits of the world find interesting in computer culture." A good thing to point your boss to, if necessary. Economist articles often include some interesting graphs -- in this case, for instance, there's an interesting chart (though from aging data) on Linux developers by their email suffixes attached to the second of these articles.

Comments

Sun versus Microsoft? Guess again.

[fm6]

The article on the migration of apps to the web portrays the whole thing as a battle between Sun and MS. The author has read too many press releases. Neither company has the vision to play more than an incidental role in the ongoing revolution.

MS built its success on Windows, which benefited from the pervasiveness of cheap IBM compatibles. Sun built its success on SPARC workstations and servers, which were powerful enough to be cost effective network boxes, despite their proprietary technology. Neither platform has a central place in the net-centric future, and both companies know it. Hence various "next generation" initiatives. But no serious observer is impressed by any of these.

.NET is an attempt to create a pervasive network platform, the way Windows is a pervasive desktop platform. MS's notion that they can repeat the success of Windows is an exercise in ego and self-delusion. Everybody outside of Redmond knows that the domination of DOS/Windows/Win32 has nothing to do with technology brilliance, and a lot to do with dumb luck and aggressive tactics that MS cannot get away with twice.

Java has always been a solution in search of a problem. Not that Java hasn't had its successes, but it has a longer list of failures: web "applets" (except for a few Yahoo games), thin clients (I don't count terminals that run GUI server apps -- these are "clients" only in marketspeak), platform-independent Office suites, smart appliances... the list goes on and on. Java has been underrated by people who don't understand the strengths of bytecode VM technlogy, but also overrated by true believers. It will always have a role, but that role is limited.

Somewhere a Finnish (no wait, we've been there) or Chinese or Nigerian computing geek is sitting down at his P90 box, cursing his flickering monitor and slow connection, and coding the killer app that he can't afford to buy. He'll upload a copy somewhere, millions of people will discover they can't live without it, and our geek is on his way to being on the cover of Time. That is that future of network computing.

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