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Wal-Mart, Moore's Law and Open Source

Posted by timothy on from the deep-thoughts dept.

J.E. Kazor writes: "In MIT's 'Technology Review' magazine, Michael Schrage writes about Wal-Mart, Moore's Law, and Open Source. Perhaps instead of spending all of our energy bashing bashing the 800-pound gorilla, Microsoft, we should align the support of a 900-pound gorilla, such as Wal-Mart. Such a symbol of cost conscious efficiency should embrace the benefits of Open Source."

17 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft the lesser of those two evils by the_radix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, instead of tackling what many people consider a monopoly, albeit a harmless (in the ecological sense) one, one should ally him- or herself with a company that the majority of liberals in this country believe is both an ecological destroyer and a monopoly on a much worse scale?

    Microsoft is software, with a dash of hardware, but they are still a high-tech company. Wal-Mart is a retailer that drives many other small local retailers out of business. Considering how easy it is to get high-tech things on the market through the use of the internet, versus the difficulty of being a local merchant, I would call Microsoft the lesser of two monopolies. If Microsoft suddenly used its power to lower all its prices so that other non-free (beer) software companies couldn't compete and went out of business, would you be happier?

    Yeah, I chose Microsoft over Wal-Mart. So mod me.

    --
    This .sig is either false or a paradox.
    1. Re:Microsoft the lesser of those two evils by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Microsoft 'harmless (in the ecological sense)'???

      What the HELL are you on? Every time they sneeze millions of HD and processors and mobs and memory and video cards and sound cards are thrown away, new ones built. I suppose you think all this stuff is built in China because it's cheaper? It's cheaper cuz they don't have to give a crap about the environment, bubba.
      The miles of paper involved in the product development, the cars the guys drive to work, etc.. etc... etc...

      What the hell are you smoking? I want some!

    2. Re:Microsoft the lesser of those two evils by Nelson · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I think it remains to be seen if Walmart is a monopoly or not. I'd be willing to bet that in a large number of areas where Walmart has a presence in the western US and the midwestern US they are the only source for a large number of products.



      They aren't a pure monopoly, but neither is MS, nor was US Steel, or most other monopolies. They are a defacto monopoly in many cases though, just like MS is. The typical Joe 6pack goes and buys a computer, he buys an MS product or a set of them, whether he knows it or not. If you live in rural Kansas or Nebraska or Texas and you need to go buy something, a large percentage of the time it's going to be from walmart, not becuase of cost but because it's the nearest store you know will have the item you wish to buy.


      I think the original message hit it on the head with Walmart. If you look at their managment, it's mostly white men, to a startling degree. There have been inqueries and lawsuits around racism and sexism at Walmart. They have a history of union busting, not that I think unions benefit the consumer a whole lot but it's disheartening the know that a corporation has chosen to close a store (a huge part of a local economy) because its employees' political views and associations they may have. And if you take the defacto monopoly business to heart and then realize that they are the only source for music, books, and even medications in some places and then look at what they have chosen to sell and not sell (I'm speaking directly about medication and contraception here, morning after pills, etc.) we're talking about a company that not only has a huge impact on the economy but on the lives of people and how they live them in a lot of places. This is not a company you wish to partner with, I think they make MS look like saints.


      Personally, I think the matter of opensource allies is kind of missing the point. We need to keep doing what we're doing. It's not a matter of IBM, Sun, Walmart or E-Trade agreeing to use free software that makes it better or takes it to the next level, those are signs that what's happening is the right thing. This is a community lead effort and if we want things to be better then become part of the community, help out, write code, use it. Looking for allies is passive. If walmart starts using linux, it won't affect or impact any of us any time soon (unless they employ Linus and bully him or something) It might give it more legitimacy but it already has legitimacy and you further legitimize it by using it and working on it. If we work on it and make it better then they will use it becuase it's the best thing to use, that's what's happening elsewhere and that's what undoes the MS monopoly.

  2. Well, at least Walmart.de runs on FreeBSD by rainer_d · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's a beginning ;-)
    Walmart.com runs with IIS on Linux...

    --
    Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
  3. Walmart.. or Big brother? by jsldub · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Walmart is the last company you would want to help out.
    1. Security cameras every 10 sq/meters in the stores
    2. Security called on anyone entering the store under the age of 18 (yes, its happened to me many occasion)
    3. Full censorship of music sold to reflect their idea of "family values"
    4. Ive heard of some walmarts not selling birth control in any form.. (I guess they want to decide who lives and dies)

    Give them some control, and they will take it all.

  4. I pay $.77 for gas... thanks Walmart! by fred911 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ... or should I?

    Sure I *love* spending the .91 a gallon I pay for premium fuel, all sparked by a Walmart gas war. They are selling at cost. They have been doing this for the past week. 2 mom and pop stations are now doing the same. I'm sure "the mart" can hang on much longer then mom and pop can.

    I wonder what I'll be paying for gas when mom and pop aren't market participants (how long do you think that will be)?

    todays prices... .77 reg, .84 mid grade and .91 for premium.

    Embrace the mart? not I

    --
    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  5. Read this before you think about it more by z7209 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0215-06.htm

    In any case, the wal-mart culture of middle-america is definitely not something I'm interested in aligning with. Makes microsoft look warm and cuddly.

  6. Given Walmart's current Point of Sale OS... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't see them converting any time soon. As a former employee of a very large company which provided Walmart all of its Point of Sale equipment, I can tell you that Walmart runs all of its Point of Sale devices on an OS called 4690, which has a shell and set of APIs that look a whole hell of a lot like DOS, while having some nicer things in the kernel like multithreading. This OS has been specifically tweaked and enhanced over the years particularly for these guys, and I can tell you that they aren't going to abandon this OS that has been essentially created for them and for a particular purpose; it is absolutely rock-solid for what it does, granted that that is slim. But I am agreed that Linux would be a great alternative for an emerging Walmart. Many large companies want to run cash registers on wimpy (486 or worse) boxes, which Windows doesn't do so well.

  7. Wal-Mart sells "Naked PC"'s by mikethegeek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wal-Mart is selling PCs without OS's

    I submitted this as an article to ./ 2 weeks ago. Rejected. This is a major example of how Wal-Mart could hurt MS.

    --
    === The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
  8. Re:Wal-Mart and Open Source? Never... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You obviously do not work at corporate in arkansas. They already are experimenting with Linux at corporate. If tests go well (most likely they will), they will start rolling out Linux into stores in about 12-24 months.

    My understanding is that they are always seeking ways of lowering cost and have realized that staying with an M$ based system would not lower it anymore (high price on OS,sysad, virus protection, software cost, && development productivity ). This is a company that is ALWAYS trying to lower the overall cost / transaction. While they have spent BILLIONS of $ on hardware and software, they have already paid for it. By moving to Linux, they are able to re-use the same hardware. The companies who did not provide Linux based apps to Wal-Mart when they asked once (& only once) will simply not be part of the plan. Apparently, they have in extreme measures of security and most folks do not find out until they are rolling out the products into stores.

    As to training, I would think that creating a similar interface for the users would allieviate all that. However, the turn-over rate of employees means that wal-mart is always training employees anyways, so that make that argument simple FUD.

  9. 80-20 and Economies of Scale by MadFarmAnimalz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I read the article, and to be honest there's nothing really new in there to justify the newsworthiness; there's no revolutionary thinking there.

    The whole idea has been stated often enough before, and I think the author was looking for the term 'critical mass'. Open source adoption has to reach critical mass - this means that we don't need to get everyone on the bandwagon, we just need enough to get the rest back on.

    This is also sometimes expressed as the 80-20 rule, a personal favorite of mine which I leverage whenever I can. 20% of the causes yield 80% of the results, generically stated.

    And while Mr. Schrage makes a good point of WalMart basically being the behemoth that can represent 20% of the causes on its own, this does not necessarily mean that it is reasonable to think they might one day go open source. It is here that the submitted story fails to compile - scale has nothing whatsoever to do with acceptance of open source. Indeed, scale may be inimical to implementation of open source.

    With an organization of WalMart's size, as another post correctly pointed out, it is always advantageous to go the tailor-made way. The reason here is another concept called 'economies of scale'; the tendency for life to get easier the bigger you get.

    A small illustration; Company A, annual net profit $10,000, and company B, annual net income $1,000,000. Both need software which, tailored, costs $1,000. It does not really get more expensive to tailor software the bigger the organization gets. More computers does not mean more individually tailored apps. You only, in other words, develop an application once. I know there's exceptions here, such as per license fees and such, but these are exceptions. In our example, company A runs CustomApp on 10 machines and company B runs it on 1,000. Each user, naturally, gains in productivity from using software created exclusively for this particular task he/she performs, and it is here that we notice that the productivity gains in company B are 100 times that felt in company A. The example here is very rough, and full of holes and I'll probably pick up a lot of posts arguing here - but it is basically a sound analysis. Tailoring just makes more sense with these big puppies.

    And tailoring software does not mix well with the ideology behind open source.

    Essentially, targeting the Company A's of the world would probably be a waste of effort, enticing as their support would be.

    Things have to be done the hard way, I think; Company B's are the way to go.

    --
    Blearf. Blearf, I say.
  10. The facts from a former corporate programmer. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm posting this anonymously because, well the NDA's are pretty vague as to what I can really say and what I can't....

    1. Wal-Mart *DOES* use Opensource

    A: About 2 1/2 years ago they started looking at Redhat, about 6 mos later (and I quote the memo that went out, given that's been 2 years ago, but I still remember it) "We will be consolidating our existing Unix Platmforms on Linux", yup, the ISP (In store processors) were to move to Redhat on Quad Dell box (they are btw Dell's largest single customer). I have no idea what the current progress of this is, but given Kevin Turner's (the CIO) statment to "Make Open platforms really Open" I doubt they would turn back on that commitment.

    B: Perl. Perl is an offically approved Language to develop on inhouse although we had quite a bit of resistance from certain in-house teams at first.

    2. Wal-Mart "going opensource" (as one poster put it) would have little effect on Sun or Oracle. This is because neither are approved vendors. Sun pissed Wally World off years ago and Oracle is deemed to be just too damned expensive (as was MS SQL Server, Informix and DB2 where the only approved databases).

    You will likely NEVER see contributions back to the community from Wally World, they simply don't allow that kind of feedback. Remember your talking about the Worlds largest company, that despite the 1700+ Programmers they have in-house, don't even allow regular Internet access from Corporate (certain sites only and no download access regardless).

    The author of the article should have done a bit more research on the topic before writing the story. A quick email to president@wal-mart.com would probally get you a better response.

    BTW: also remember your talking about a company that does NOT patent it's internal software like many other companies, they view it entirely as trade secret instead (just ask Amazon.com :-) )

  11. PostgreSQL vs. Oracle, and the Big Picture by jabbo · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I've done MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle DBA on live sites which were heavily beaten on and had, as customers at various times, Olivetti Inc., CNN, CSPAN, NBC, Fox, Reuters, Bloomberg, Business Week, NOAA, and the Department of Defense. Currently I run PostgreSQL for everything except Snort logging, because


    0) I can tune it in about 5 minutes a day, from cron

    1) it's cheaper than Oracle, with full transactions, and

    2) I can only get Windows binaries of Snort that use MySQL. (eg. the one thing I use MySQL for)


    I would not consider MySQL for serious applications because it doesn't do subselects (AFAIK) and its transaction support is fairly new (again AFAIK). Our applications DO need full transaction support for some applications that need versioned updating which only increments on success (hard to explain without showing you the code, which I can't under my NDA.)
    I use MySQL for Snort because Roman says that its performance for ACID is the best, and my site seems to bear that out. MySQL 3.2x crumbled in production on a site I managed, and that soured me on the product.


    Oracle is a BEAST. Properly tuned, it can blow the doors off of competitors, and OracleTool (http://www.oracletool.com/ is a terrific, free tool. But licensing costs for Oracle make it a tool that is best used in places where it's been in-place for years. I wouldn't adopt it at a new company. Since that's exactly what I work for these days, we use Postgres.


    I doubt Wal-Mart will switch from Oracle (or DB2, or Sybase, or SQL Server) if they have a running installation of it. Most likely, it's on Sun if it's an Oracle installation; Blockbuster has a couple of E10K's (or did, last year, at Exodus Sunnyvale) for what appears to be their inventory control and billing system. If it ain't broke, why 'fix' it?


    If you need replication, there's always RServ for Postgresql, right now. The number of sites which actually need multimaster replication is not great, and those that do seem to be running DB2 on a Parallel Sysplex or Oracle HA on a SunCluster, in my experience.


    Red Hat already supports PostgreSQL. That version is called 'Red Hat Database'. I run Red Hat because I find ext3 to be a useful innovation, and I compile custom kernels; in my personal experience, the individual kernel maintainers for a given functionality (eg. LVM) can be hired for consultation or reached through mailing lists at a similar time-and-opportunity cost to what I'd encounter with a support contract from Red Hat.


    Then again, I've been doing this for a while, and am probably not a 'representative' engineer... I've seen some pretty scary loads in my day, not what your average mope encounters, and my customers do not accept downtime.


    We use Win2K servers where I work, too, because sometimes that's what is necessary to get the job done. I'd suggest that Wal-Mart's philosophy is closer to mine than to the average open-source hippie's, but with thousands of employees, you have to figure that many of them will be most familiar with Windows, and there is a lot of lock-in incentives for NT/2000/XP on the server side. It wouldn't make sense to expend effort and/or money to chase some mythical Linux 'savings' in many of the applications they find to be 'core'.


    As always, YMMV.

    --
    Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
  12. Wal-Mart by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I may not be the best to talk about Wal-Mart, but I do play in it's sandbox. Here at the University of Arkansas, Wal-Mart has poured millions into the business college. They have a $6,000 dollar 42" plasma tv scrolling news about the department. EVERY classroom has overhead projectors. The business school has the nicest computers on campus, hands down. And don't get me started on how nice the rest of their stuff is.

    All this time, my side of the computational divide (computer engineering) can barely put together a functional networking lab. It's a kludge of old gateway pc's that run about 133Mhz on average. The teacher who runs it refers to it as the "Crapper Lab". Out biggest donation that I can remember was a half million from Acxiom to fund a database chair. Woop-de-do. I don't think we've seen it because of politics somewhere in the College of Engineering.

    Wal-Mart is not about technology. Wal-Mart is cultural juggernaut that is stream rolling across the country leaving concrete deserts in its wake. Wal-Mart may be on the bleeding edge of "efficiency optimization", but they'll never adopt linux. Look at where their education donations go. Imagine their corporate enviroment. Wal-Mart does not take chances. Every dime they spend has a nickel's worth of research behind it. They're not about software innovation, they just want to know what's going to reduce cost and increase sales.

    There may be a linux box stuck in the corner someday installed by a wayward techy, but for the most part Wal-Mart Associates (that's what they call ALL EMPLOYEES) wouldn't step out of line any more than a borg drone.

  13. Re:Wal-Mart and Open Source? Never... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting
    HP-UX as part of the POS (point-of-sale) network

    No, Wal-Mart uses IBM's 4690 OS, and has for decades (in their POS terminals). In fact, Wal-Mart is the primary reason that 4690 is still around. It is possible that either Wal-Mart will move 100% to Linux, or (more likely) 4690 OS will adopt the Linux kernel (replacing its current kernel).

  14. Re:Productivity by cyberon22 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The only problem with the Solow paradox is that it's wrong.... ;)

    Solow made his infamous statement in 1986, long before email, the Internet, and even word processing were standard business tools. More recent stats tell us that productivity SURGED in the late 1990s (at least in the US). Slashdotters might even remember (fondly?) the debate from about three years ago when some were questioning if any limits remained to perpetual productivity gains!

    This is a nicely written piece, but he has no evidence other than rampant speculation to suggest that Wal-Mart is somehow a greater source of productivity gain in the American economy than... say... email, or the plummetting costs of telecommunications.

    A nicely written article, but Schrage should be more careful not to draw such unsubstantiated conclusions.

  15. The real value of free software by argoff · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't think many people understnad...

    Today I can roll my own opperating system for under $1000, where merely 10 years ago it would cost over 10 million - that is the value of free software. (in fact, with any free software, not just opperating systems)

    Today if I want my 500 friends (business partners, whatever) to veiw special graphic files, I don't half to send them out to buy a $300 software package. Now they can get it for free saving 150K between us - that is the value of free software

    Today I can collaberate with my 500 friends (business partners, whatever) - if we each make a $200 improvement to a software package we each get a piece of software with $100000's worth of improvement. That is the value of free software.

    These forces are pushing free software into the marketplace, and are the reason why it is and will become prevalent everywhere. Even if WalMart goes gung ho against Linux, it will make no difference. They are not the force driving Linux - WalMart is small compaired to global marketplace, Linux will happen either way.

    The fact that he is so up there thinking that chains like WallMart are going to make all the difference shows that he just doesn't get it and is out of touch with what is really happening in the trenches.