Xerox-Microsoft Partner

tea-leaves writes "Xerox and Microsoft are partnering to put Windows NT in their print boxes and such. Story says the technology replaces "UNIX-compatible" software already in place. Xerox wants to compete with HP for the desktop printing market with integrated printer solutions that use Microsoft software for the interconnect. Check it out. " I feel like we're going to have to re-sanctify Palo Alto after this.

Comments

Microsoft

[drwiii]

This is a match made in heaven. Both companies excel at copying other people's work.

:-)

Wow

[Pudding Yeti]

This puts me in mind of my first encounter ever with a PHB.

I worked at a copy shop in a major midwestern university that shall go unnamed. We ran three Xerox Docutechs and some smaller machines.

We ended up buying a Sun/Xerox network box of some sort. It was brought in with a lot of fanfare. I was a courier at the time, but the school gave all employees accounts on the school computers, so I was learning my way around as an Ultrix user from a Lear/Seigler ADM3a+ and a 1200 baud dialup at night.

Everyone stood around while the techs installed the thing and brought it up. I had never, at that point, seen X in action before so I had no idea there was a *nix under the hood. It wasn't until one of the techs brought up a term and I saw some of the commands they were typing that I realized what it was.

The boss 'in charge' of the machine announced that we were going to take great pains to keep the machine in good shape, and in order to keep it like new, we'd be shutting it down promptly at five every night.

Needless to say, it began to accumulate stuff that never got shuffled out by whatever housekeeping it was supposed to be doing at night, and soon the hard drive was full of undeleted tmp files and aborted print runs.

Eager to prove myself, pre-larval as I was, I went to the PHB and pointed out that the machine was running some sort of Unix and we ought to leave it on, as God intended, or figure out how the housekeeping was supposed to be done and reset some times. She told me it was just like Windows (3.0 was the current version at the time) and we didn't need to do that. I went over her head and got permission to at least twiddle with it to keep the logs rotated and the /tmp files cleaned out. She promptly took all the documentation and locked it in her office, changed all the passwords, and had me rotated to the night shift.

The machine continued to crash right and left, and no one could get at it to fix things. The PHB kept insisting it was just a faulty product. It was eventually branded a failed experiment and taken away.

I've since thought it was a rotten idea to sell a *nix box to a bunch of glorified Kinko's employees and expect them to do anything other than what they did at my shop. The support was god-awful, and the training I was eventually sent to never went past 'this is the garbage can... this is how to click and drag.'

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mphall@cstone.nospam.net

Saw that coming...

[23skiddoo]

Yeah, I remember attending some classes for Xerox software (VIPP) at their local offices. One of their drones was rubbing his hands with glee that pretty soon "everyone will be running NT--it's where computing is going." Another person swayed by what is essentially a pretty interface sitting atop an OS that is trying to reinvent the wheel.
We currently use 2 DocuTech 6135s for the digital printing side of our printing/fulfillment business. They are both driven by Ultra SPARC boxes running Solaris, so setting up automated tasks with my Linux Internet server and workstation has been frighteningly easy. And they've been (for the most part) terrific machines.
I am worried now that if and when we get a DocuColor or other high-speed printer from Xerox, we will be forced to use shoddy Winblows software--just like we were when we updated the document assembly facet of the operation. (Get this: we bought our own PC ($3K) for their XDOD document assembly software/system instead of buying their Compaq box ($10K). Now, if there's a problem on that machine, the techs will 90% of the time blame it on "incompatible hardware" and refuse to support it. Also, it runs NT and when I wanted to add a CD-burner for backing up jobs I had to install the latest service pack (3). Well, when I asked Xerox if this might be an issue, they said that their software wasn't tested enough on SR3 and that if we ran into problems later, they might have us revert to SR1! Aaargh!)
What really bothers me is that we may eventually have to sell our souls and adopt more and more Windoze applications because either that is what our customers expect or because we can't find the apps we need on *nix. (As another aside, we just recently visited a software company in Connecticut that makes a pretty good warehouse/fulfillment system that is currently available on SCO or NT, but their next major release will be NT only. Our plan is to get the SCO version now (partly because we have a SCO box with plenty of room already), but what about the future? We could migrate to NT in a few years, but dammit, I want more options!)

I know I'm probably preaching to the choir, but I don't want to live in Bill's version of the world, but it seems like our options are narrowing, in spite of the open source/free software movement. I guess we're in an interim period where business-ready open source apps are still being developed.