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Former Windows Chief on Microsoft Vs. Open-Source
prostoalex writes "Brad Silverberg, former chief of Microsoft Windows division, who left the company in 1999, is being interviewed by the Milestone Group, on Microsoft specifically, and the software venture capital world in general (Silverberg is currently working as managing partner for Ignition Partners). He provides an interesting viewpoint on Microsoft's understanding of open source: 'I don't think they have figured that out yet, I think that is clear. They are struggling with not so much open source, per se, but rather they are no longer the low price solution. In the past Microsoft was the low cost solution and Microsoft was then competing and attacking expensive proprietary systems from below. Now for the first time the tables are turned and it's Microsoft that's being attacked from below by a lower price solution. Microsoft needs to figure out how it can demonstrate better TCO to justify its higher prices. Another aspect to that, which is an area I think Microsoft is also struggling with, which is when you are as successful and dominant as they are, how do you continue to foster that ecosystem? What really propelled Microsoft Windows success was an ecosystem that they created that allowed other people to benefit from your success. Actually your success was really a side effect or byproduct of their own success.'"
I don't think they have figured that out yet, I think that is clear. They are struggling with not so much open source, per se, but rather they are no longer the low price solution.
Was Microsoft *ever* the low price solution? I'm sure I'm not the only one who laughed at the whole "they haven't figure that out yet" part. They haven't figured *anything* out yet. That's why we got rid of the feudal system -- because government, on all levels (including corporate management) should be for the people, by the people. My point is that Microsoft, being ruled by King Gates, is behind the times while they are trying to be ahead of the times. They are a working paradox. Open Source is to Closed Source, as Hive Societies are to Kingdoms; one clearly is better than the other and I think we can all agree which one it is.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
There are damn few large businesses that can handle a large change, let alone a fundamental change. Those that survive change (GE, e.g.) are generally so massive that they can lose some divisions' whole business model and carry on.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
_ALL_ Economics is based on "frankly don't have a clue on how to address it", except for the little bit that actually understands that the economy is a dynamic system with a _huge_ number of bodies and variables, and thus you must consider it using probablistic and statistical methods.
First step is to realise that "The Economy" is something that _WE_ created.... there is no intrinsic economy created by some supreme being.. and we shouldn't get carried away considering it as something holy that needs to be studied.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Silverberg says, "In the past Microsoft was the low cost solution and Microsoft was then competing and attacking expensive proprietary systems from below."
In the realm of personal computers, I do not think this observation is accurate at all. Microsoft's approach was not to compete on price in the normal sense of the word. Rather, Microsoft's approach was to bundle applications with the operating system. Since these applications and utilities were thus already "paid for" (or included for "free" in people's minds), people had less incentive to buy competing applications, even though the competing applications were often better.
I think the distinction is important. If a particular application becomes popoular, Microsoft just rolls a copy of it into the OS, thereby gutting the market for that application. How many people buy Eudora anymore? Or Netscape? Or Trumpet Winsock? This is not the same thing as competing on price.
I think it case could be made that very few people actually benefited from Microsoft's success that weren't inside of Microsoft. Yeah sure, a few developers here and there who made some apps, but most of them were then bought up by Microsoft (see: Visio). I think Microsoft is struggling, because for the first time they're having to actually sell their software on its merits. The customer has real choices. They can use Open Office that costs them nothing, or they can spend alot of money on Microsoft Office. Microsoft has to convince those people who use 1% of their products functionality that the product is worth the cost. As free or low cost alternatives come of age, that argument gets harder.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Why do people act as if Microsoft's ship is sinking? Is MS not GAINING in the server market? I could swear it was. Is MS not DOMINATING the desktop market? I could swear it was. Have I suddenly awoken in the fabled "Year of Linux"?
The only market MS seems to be slipping in is the web browser market. Even there, with 2(+?) years of doing nothing to improve their browser, they dominate the market.
I am tired of reading about "total cost of ownership". It is a made-up concept
Any concept of the inner workings of a Fortune 500 company? i.e. what it means to have thousands upon thousands of non technical users who are now required to use a PC for their job 8 hours a day? Any idea on earth what it costs to support these people? (hint- these operatives may make as low as minimum wage, but the people supporting them certainly don't!)
Why Not? - Because they are no longer meeting all IT needs, in fact they are basically the problem. Security is more important today.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
This article is basically what people here on Slashdot have already said ad nauseum. Microsoft is struggling to compete with something free, and Microsoft is struggling to compete with itself. I already knew that from countless discussions on the subject beforehand.
If the kids are smart enough to know about linux.. theyre most certainly in the know enough to pass around a pirated copy of windows.
Let's not forget that Windows was also running on commodity hardware. In the early years, it wasn't "Windows" - it was Mac or PC. People were buying a platform with all the advantages of commodity hardware; price, selection, customization, etc. The PC platform had considerable draw from the market. It was able to provide value to customers that previous proprietary computing products lacked. And in the end, the commodity platform "won".
That's not to say Microsoft didn't do a good job with supporting developers. They did better than Apple in many ways. But in those days, that simply ensured that "Killer App Version 2.0" was available for the "PC" as well as other platforms.
The real success for Windows was in it's being the catalyst for commoditization of the hardware market. And then riding the ensuing wave.
Now we're facing a possible next wave in IT; commoditization of the OS. Microsoft would clearly have issues with this. And they would rather fight it than try and ride this one too (or at least not start paddling for it until the very last minute). It's interesting to see that one notable who was plowed under by the earlier wave is now trying to set up to ride this one; IBM.
As long as Windows continues to be preloaded on a majority of machines, Windows will continue to sell (duh) and some of their apps will continue to sell.
On another note...
Ha! I remember a sentence in 'Undocumented DOS' so many years ago: "Your product may be a DLL in the next version of Windows." So the developers are finally wising up, eh? About fucking time.TCO, Total Cost of Ownership, isn't bogus - it's just a different/newer way of looking at how much an asset "really" costs someone. It might be used in some FUD that some software (or any other) companies put out to try and get people to buy their product, but it doesn't have to apply just to software and/or computers.
You could apply a TCO formula to just about everything. For example, the "TCO" of my car includes:
- How much I paid for it,
- How much insurance costs me,
- What the gas mileage is (how much gas costs me),
- How many people can it hold (how "efficient" is it?),
- How many other uses does it have that would cost me money to get otherwise (like towing), and
- other factors that I'm sure I'm forgetting right now.
One definition of TCO found on the web is (and there are a few):
"The life cycle cost view of an asset, which includes acquisition, setup, support, ongoing maintenance, service and all operating expenses. It focuses attention on the sum of all costs of owning an asset, as opposed to the initial or vendor cost, and is useful in outsourcing decisions."
(From The Bridgefield Group)
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
While all this talk about who's got the lower TCO, who has more problems with security, and who has the better technologies, one can easily forget one fact. The "OS Wars" come down to one thing: How well does Linux/Windows/Apple/Other attract the average user? I personally know a guy who purchased a computer based on the fact that the store demo machine had the "Silver" skin selected...he claimed that he disliked the other computer's version of Windows XP (the other box he was looking at had "Luna" selected.) To the average person, the two most important things are: 1) Does the machine work? and 2) How does it look?
Linux far surpasses Windows in regard to the first question, yet that is overshadowed by Microsoft's UI. True, they make a ton of compromises in security, reliability, and ease of development, but at least they attract users that way. I actually dislike Microsoft, but I am willing to admit that they have found a very effective way onto the drives of millions...
While the OSS choices may be better in most ways, a flashy interface is by far the best at attracting a new user...
The real litigious bastards...
You still need input variables to your model, and as the model is a simplification in itself, you need to be extremely careful how you interpret the output.
I'm not saying that models have no value, but if the model tells you exactly what the gold price is going to be in 30 days time (for example), you need to know what the uncertainty is... which means we are back to probabilities and statistics.
A good way to use models is to perturb the inputs slightly and see how your outputs diverge. This is classic chaos theory. If a small change in input doesn't change the output, your model is stable.
Its relation to reality is another thing entirely. I've seen beautiful models that produce beautiful, stable, consistent but utterly meaningless results.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Yeah, but most kids these days are interested in computers for one reason: games. And as long as all games will be released on the windows platform (including cracked versons of Windows XP), kids will keep on using windows.
I respect your opinion on the matter, and for many people it does make a great deal of sense, but I see it differently.
I use OSS/Free Software when it's the best tool for the job. Right now I'm using Opera on Windows XP, but my servers run Linux.
OSS being cheaper($$$) than propriatary software is just one aspect of it being better in certain situations. As much as is possible, I leave my religion and politics out of my professional life.
For RMS and the like Free Software could be called a religion, the belief that Free Software is always better can be argued for convincingly. But ideology isn't a good way to convert new users.
People don't like being preached at. Standing on a soapbox browbeating people will get you fewer converts.
To me, this is never a battle driven by competition leading to lower prices. Rather, it has always been the ideologies involved.
I think that people like you, and people like me can and should work together on this. Lower prices is what prompted me to get my feet wet, so to speak, and that lead me to learn more about the OSS/Free Software philosophy. Use the lower price advantage to get people interested. Once they begin to listen to what you have to say, you can share the ideology without seeming like you're preaching or browbeating them.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Have falling sales due to open source? How about changing your 95% profit margin to a 50% profit margin?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Even here, the situation is improving, from a Linux point of view. Look at UT2004 and Doom 3. Two of the big releases this year, and one has Linux binaries (and even an install script) on the same CDs as the windows version, and the other is promising Linux binaries to download. Linux gaming is going mainstream. Slowly, but it's happening.
another problem is that MS funded TCO studies do not accurately anticipate downtime caused by malware or virus outbreaks. windows may be the winner in some studies, but statistics on paper can't guarantee a lower TCO in real life. If MS wants to be more credible, they should conduct a research on average downtime and estimate of financial damages caused by malware/virus last 6 months. My guess is that the world biggest marketing company won't do.
I believe you are incorrect. Both Netscape and Java were deadly competitors to Microsoft and, by their philosophy, nothing was to be spared in crushing these companies.
Netscape presented the vision of making the operating system irrelevant. Let's look at two of the most popular software products of the last few years: Google and Amazon. Yes, these are software products and each is completely platform agnostic. When I use Google or Amazon on Linux running Firefox, I get the exact same user experience as I get on Windows using IE. If this trend had continued, with the browser and its associated control of the user interface firmly in the hands of Netscape, Microsoft's monopoly position as the operating system of choice would have been lost.
Java was a danger due to a similar argument. Windows is popular because the most popular applications run on it. If Java delivered on its promise of platform independence, a whole new class of killer applications could have arose that were independant of the operating system. Microsoft would then no longer be the operating system of choice. Worse, it would not be the choice for the developers making new killer apps.
Killing Netscape and Java were not paranoid manoevers, they were carefully considered and rational defenses of one of Microsoft's two core strengths, the Operating System. Combined with the other strength: Office, Microsoft presents a huge barrier to entry for anyone attempting to wrest monopoly control over desktop computers from Microsoft.
The problem for Microsoft is they took out the companies, not the ideas. By the time they noticed, the idea of a universal browser was too well entrenched to go away. They have not yet succeeded in converting the Internet to a Microsoft only product (despite the best efforts of ActiveX and IIS).
Building a better Java is not an answer. At some point, the competitors would catch up to a standard such as a language, then how could Microsoft compete? Add features? To Sun's language?
And what happens when someone reimplements 80% of Office in Java? And suppose this new version runs just as nicely on Windows as, say, Mac? What's to keep people on Windows then?
No, these companies had to die. Nothing else would defend Microsoft's monopoly. That they attacked these companies is unfortunate, but part of our system of business. That they did so by exploiting their monopoly position is illegal and should have got them more severly punished.
1991: Wow, Linux is fun to hack. I just want to build an OS for myself.
1994: Wow, Linux is still fun to hack. I just want to build an OS for myself and a few thousand friends.
1997: Wow, Linux is still fun to hack. And people are taking this stuff seriously. I'm glad I built it from the ground up with security/efficiency/stability in mind.
I more or less agree with what you posted about Linux in the year 2000. But let's not forget Linux's roots.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Microsoft thinks the laws of economics don't apply to them. They whine but they don't compete. The retail cost of Windows XP is now more than the cost of many computers.
I don't know about TCO numbers. It may be more useful to outline how one goes about managing a heterogeneous *NIX network vs. a Windows network. You know, things like cfengine, Perl, CVS, net-snmp, ssh, X windows, etc. Granted, Microsoft has equivalents (eg. terminal services), but you have to pay for them up-front and they're not cheap.
i disagree. you are thinking to much horizontal market (i.e. netscape, wordperfect etc.)
;) (and ask yourself why you won't find such software for linux desktops..
where people really benefit from the microsoft monoply is the vertical market, software for solicitors, craftsman, real estate firms etc. you still can make a lot of bugs with (mostly badly written) software for very specific professional groups because you write it for windows and everyone has windows. think visual basic
PAT
SEO Test: TIGI und SEBASTIAN - Online Shop - V
>The fact of the matter is, whatever the kids (high school and college) use is where the industry is going.
You don't think kids want to play PC games? And what about IM? Run XP to get the latest IM functionality (try to get the webcam running in the MS IM on Linux. Now try it with XP)
And have you've seen MS seminars at colleges? They give away the OS and compilers.
>Forget TCO and stuff like this.
Business methology isn't going to change in 20 years. You will still need to justify decisions and "Well, I used it in high school." isn't going to cut it.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
what about the "Linux Journal" article by the guy at Cisco who quietly replaced all their departmental Windows-based printer (and file?) servers with a few Linux boxes, that not only required about 0 reboots, were more stable, etc., but also were/are remotely managable with ease, and the savings that brought on by not having to go to the remote building just to reboot the box?
Fewer boxes, much lower licensing costs, much lower operational and labor costs, etc.
In terms of adoption, it's not the ideologies of the developers that matter so much as those of the users, except when they differ to such a degree as to be incompatible.
Users want something that gets the job done that costs as little as possible. Generally speaking they could give a shit if it's open source or not, if it's Free Software or not.
To the user, this is a battle over prices, driven by competition. If Microsoft gives them Office, they probably won't bother with OpenOffice.org, due to the immense momentum of MS Office. However, that's not going to happen, so Microsoft has to resort to lies - they sure aren't depending on their technical superiority. They, like we, know that would be fruitless.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
These words have server a lot of people well and it should serve MS well to.
;)or whatever they want to name it and linux (The kernel that rules the x86 ;)). :(), misc apps.
:D.
As many here have said, Linux won't go away.
So if MS can't make Linux go away they should simply become like IBM. With there power they could really influence the Open Source community in any direction they want.
The first step is to port Office to linux(it's already working on mac os X, so that wouldn't be to hard to port). Then you make a killer GUI that will smash Apple's aqua to bits and finaly stopping all those switchers from the x86.
The important thing is to keep people on the x86 with office, Space GUI(space is cold and dark you know , gotta keep there old image
Then when they are the employers of 90% of the linux kernel coders (which they surely will be).
Now they have the power to control the way linux moves.
Becuse they employ the mayority of the kernel and surely most of the developers to X and all the other important liberaries.
Now they can optimize the whole system for there killer GUI, office, smb(Don't remember the real name of the protocol
And they can become the biggest distro
Ofcourse they have to do this slowly, phase out windows first in the server area then in the coperate area and last the homes.
They have to understand that there kernel is CRAP and would cost more money to develop to a better kernel then linux then to use the linux kernel.
Remember, there are som really great minds employed by MS. They just need to let them lose.
God,root what's the difference? I read slashdot, there for I errr... am stupid?
MS fights as hell to keep the status quo. They stopped development of the IE, because they do not want computer to be web. They want computer to be MS Windows.
l
You may read http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.htm
But it could be seen even before. Even before the www, I recall that we dreamed about computer environment where you could move across the world, but just to aproach nearest terminal, log in, and there you are, your desktop, files and everything is there. We used to have Novell/Win3.11 network in our comp lab in university. OK, it was not across the world, but it worked fine. You could log whenever you wanted, and everything was there - PC's acted just like terminals, from your perspective. Next version, with NT network, never worked OK. Some programs could not be installed only on server (to be honest nonMS ones)... so the idea went away. Diskless stations had to be replaced with stations with HDDs...(actually, even in Novel/3.11 they were not diskless, but disks contained no real data). If you needed Corel, you had to pick exactly that station with Corel installed.
Then www appeared, but they never liked the idea. If they allow IE to act like complete PC - meaning that you can do text processing in it (for example) - they would replace OS with browser. They would replace their golden hen (desktop OS) with something they cannot control so tightly, and with something that other coulc probably copy. Why would they change current state of affairs? Thick client is what made them rich, and they will try to follow that model as much as they can. They don't like gmail, ebay and everything else ferature rich but web-based - since it is excactly the path what they do not like to happen.
No sig today.
One doesn't need to ignore administration costs to see that Windows is more expensive. In fact, it HELPS to include administration costs, provided the study doesn't lie about them. One Windows admin is typically cheaper than one linux admin, this is true. But Linux doesn't need as much admin time as Windows, so it doesn't have the same servers-to-admins ratio.
Here's the real truth of TCO:
If the business is not computer-related, and thus the people in the company are not computer literate and shouldn't be expected to become computer literate, then Windows has lower TCO because it lets you do the simple things simply. If the business is computer-related, or large enough that it is expected to grow some in-house expertise, then Windows has higher TCO because it ONLY lets you do the simple things simply, at the expense of making the complex things really painful to deal with.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Not that I really disagree with your conclusion, but this part of your argument is bullshit. 'Back in the day' making boot disks for MacOS was as easy as pie.
Up until System 7.5 MacOS came on only a half dozen disks, without any kind of copy-protection scheme, and you didn't need an activation key to do the install (you still don't, btw). All you really needed was a Macintosh computer. You could even trim the install disks down to one disk by making a cross-platform system installation and copying it (and a few other files) to a floppy, much like you could (and still can) with MS-DOS. Admittedly, by the late nineties MacOS had ballooned to several dozen floppies (and usually came on a CD-ROM), but by the time that happened you could easily burn a CD from the original.
The real point of, however, is that Macs (the hardware) were expensive and few people were willing to shell out the initial investment to get one. The required initial investment for a PC could be, easily, half to a third that of a Mac (if you were willing to take some risks with no-name parts and cobble it all together yourself. The no-name parts were a bigger risk in the late-eighties and early-nineties than they are today).
Whether anybody actually saved money by buying a PC instead of a Mac is dubious (the faster upgrade cycle on PCs tends to even the playing field by substituting "rents" for "spent-costs") but lots of folks (myself included*) prefer to spend a large amount of money over a long period of time rather than all at once, even if they end up spending more (hence the popularity of credit cards, car leases, rented furniture and layaway plans).
To a first order approximation, the popularity of MS-Windows (and MS-DOS before it) is entirely due to the fact that it ran on cheap, multi-source, readily available hardware. Sure, the bundling plans helped a bit (but they probably weren't really necessary) and the rise of Dell and Gateway had some late term effect, but the initial impetus was from cost and availability.
* I still use Macs, but I usually buy second hand: this is how I manage to spend a lot less on initial investments than if I bought my Macs brand new. I end up spending about the same amount of money, once all the upgrades have been applied (faster CPU, more memory, bigger hard-drive, better video card, etc.) but I get to string it out over six months, which makes my wallet feel fatter along the way.
Say what you will about Windows as an operating system, but the application development toolchain is really, really slick.
I admit that I have less experience with Microsoft's tools than I do with with the Linux ones. However, I was fairly unimpressed with what I saw. Perhaps I'm missing something -- I'd love to be enlightened, as I see a number of MS people talking about how great the MS development environment is, but it seems to, well, kind of suck to me.
* The build configuration manager in Visual Studio is not very good. You create a new build (I think the defaults in a new project are "Debug" and "Release"), but if you want to maintain several configurations (Build, Release, non-GUI, etc), it gets to be a pain in the ass, and you have to copy options around from configuration to configuration. GNU make is much more flexible.
* A number of people seem to like the editor. I'll concede that it has a reasonably nice interface for completion, but I use xemacs as my editor, and Visual Studio really does not compare, now that I have xemacs set up *just* so. xemacs has similar completion (though without the argument descriptions and with an indexing pass) via etags.
* I've gotten errors/warnings during compilation from VS that I've found unclear before. I will concede that this may just a matter of the fact that I am very familiar with gcc and know its warnings well.
* VS apparently has a debugger that lets you modify code at the source level while debugging (that's one heck of a hack). Haven't played with it, but a few people have spoken of it positively, so I'll fly with it there.
* As GNU make runs, it prints out all the commands that it is executing. If a build step fails, you can see exactly what command was executing and what previous commands did. I've had times when Visual Studio said something like "Tool Command Failed", and I was reduced to commentin out lines in the pre- or post- build environment until the errors changed to determine what was going wrong.
* VS creates a ton of temporary and other files when you create projects. That's a little annoying.
* Pre-.NET version of VS use pseudo-text project files (.dsw). They *look* like text files, but VS cannot handle alternate line terminators on them. This is a pain when checking files into a CVS repository.
* I've had VS crash on me a during builds or other activity fair number of times. I haven't had gcc, GNU make, or xemacs crash on me in a long time.
* Free or bundled-with-VS diagnostic tools on Windows are relatively poor. I've cobbled together a set of tools that I generally use on Windows (filemon, regmon, Dependency Walker), but they don't really compare to the excellent free diagnostic software available for Linux.
* RAD tools -- I'm not a big fan of the Access or other RAD tool interfaces in Microsoft's development tools, but then I don't like glade and friends much either, so I can't really call out either.
I dunno. I'm just curious as to what I'm missing that people think is so fantastic.
May we never see th
Open Source folks need to go out there also and start publishing their cost ownership numbers, with real life examples.
;) ), they're just writing a tool that is useful to them, and making it available in case it is useful to other people as well.
By "Open Source folks" I assume you mean "companies that sell services centered around open source software"? Keep in mind that most of the developers and people writing OSS don't really care who uses it (though they certainly like when people do). They're not out to destroy Microsoft (well, not most of them, anyways
I'm an IT guy in a small company, and didn't really track this closely, but I definately saw a decrease in the amount of time I spent dealing with network problems after switching to Samba/linux (from NT4). Sure, it took me some time to get everything set up (but the same is true for installing any OS), and it probably took more than using, say, Windows Server, but now I basically don't have to think about it.
I've used other server products too (nt4, 2k, netware 5), so I do have a bit of a basis to compare (though I have to admit Netware 5 was very nice, and I'd love to run it except it costs too much for a generally non-tech company that doesn't want to spend money on IT).
I'm sure there will be many people replying telling me how this is all BS, that windows is much easier.. but thats the point, I don't really care. For me, this was easier, I spent less time overall, so yes, that translates to lower TCO.
Speak before you think
Its relation to reality is another thing entirely. I've seen beautiful models that produce beautiful, stable, consistent but utterly meaningless results.
"There is nothing so horrifying as witnessing the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts."
--unknown
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Here is the real TCO.
No matter how much MS spends money on advertising reality does not change. People who have ever used linux know what the deal is. For example ZDNET australia once published a study showing that an average linux sysadmin controlled many more servers then an average windows sysadmin. Until MS makes windows easier to manage en masse this fact will not change.
The real problem with MS is not TCO. It's that the people don't need to go through a procurement process to download and install free software. No approvals, no delays, no beuracracy. Admins are much more likely to slap a linux box to do something if the alternative is to fill out paperwork and have five managers give their OK to spend $500.00.
Freedom is important to corporations (and corporate drones) too.
evil is as evil does
MS Word has always been better than Wordperfect.
Absolutely untrue. MS Word has always been different from Word Perfect, but Word was designed around discovery, not around workflow. You can get more done in any version of Word Perfect faster, and WP had cascading markup well before the days of HTML -- a lot of people prefer this to the Microsoft stylesheets and sections method. Word Perfect -- up until 6.0, which was the first attempt to go beyond workflow into the WYSIWYG paradigm and it was slow as hell -- was a brilliant piece of software with a simple interface. Best of all, if you didn't know how to do something, you could press F3, type the letter of what function you were looking for, and it would tell you how to do it. There was a menu if you wanted, and syntax highlighting if you wanted. Otherwise, it was just you and the text. No distractions. Very productive. Worth the $300.
You would have to be connected to everyone else 100% of the time for that to happen. Open Source is like the hive design
Open Source is hardly the model of connectivity. In fact, since the model demands that somebody be willing to do the work they need done, or willing to do the work for somebody else, there are segments of the market -- beginners who are non-programmers with no other computers -- who will never be connected. Furthermore, I've notice many Open Source afficianados are complete dicks. Hard to have 100% pure communication when your success depends on a guy whose answer to every question is "STFU and RTFM, n00b." Heck, those words don't even make SENSE outside of the context of the community.
This sounds like Bill Gates' comment regarding onboard memory.
The one he never made? You know, bringing up points that are provably false doesn't help your argument or your image.
Do you call everyone kid?
Only children,
Hey freaks: now you're ju