Re:Am I missing something? (I'm missing it too :)
on
Linux is Not Red Hat
·
· Score: 2
I think you one of the few people that hit the nail on the head here. They are trying to sell a product (an IDE) to people who historically haven't seen much or any need for such a product, no has shown much inclination towards spending money or using non-open source products. There's a really chance that Codewarrior/Linux could bomb big time.
Furthermore, they are trying to sell to a 'community' that has agreed to disagree about any standard beyond by-the-book POSIX. Now that the product's done, your number one problem is providing support for your customers. The problem is that your customers could be running almost anything under the sun in any possible manner.
So it's a no brainer to limit your support initially to the most recent revision of the most popular distribution. They might go bankrupt otherwise. On the other hand, if the product takes off, and their phone jockeys get up to speed, supporting other distributions is the smart thing to do. --
Actually, Windows installers like to downgrade this and other system DLLs also as well as upgrade them. They also change the time-date stamps on the files so often you don't know what you have or why. Chalk it up to Microsoft letting the ISVs and their own app division put out the service packs for them. (And OS stability suffering for it.)
Linux has it's own form of library hell, as the Codewarrior support example seems to verify, but I'm sure that someone will figure out what 50 things to manually upgrade to get CW running on their slackware box.
I would imagine that installers that automatically prompt you to upgrade your libs are coming. There's no way to create a modern (ie, not Motif or monolithic) Linux app that can easily run on all distributions without it.
However, the only way to avoid a Windows-like DLL jumble in this scenario is a dependancy database that dead on accurate. This sounds like it means deb and not rpm, so maybe redhat should just get over it and adopt deb.
Anyway it shows that Linux has a way to go in certain places, if only because nobody really knows how to package a commercial application for it. Too many more Netscapes, Star Offices, and WordPerfects are definately bad news if you are interested in commercial adoption. --
That's just what Corel is doing with Debian -- adding value by including wordperfect with the installation. Which is great if you really need WordPerfect, but I would guess the demand isn't enough for them to corner the market that way.
The only thing that RedHat really sells now is the warm fuzzy feeling of a manual and installation support. Once people figure they can do it themselves, their shrinkwrap market is going to dry up immedately. --
Unlike other software companies, RedHat can't be betting the farm on shrinkwrapped software and the typical upgrade cycle. While RedHat may selling tons of copies now, they market is going to figure out pretty quick that there's no reason to spend $50 when you can spend $3. (And if they try to take their installer proprietary, there's always Debian.)
Where they will make money is on per seat/per year support agreements with companies who deploy Linux. They also can sub-contract to Dell, Compaq for integration and support services. There's also for hire device driver development, system tuning, and per call phone support.
The picture here is that they will be selling services, not so much products. Growth in the services business is much more linear, so I wouldn't expect a huge exponential boom in revenues/stock price. --
The MacOS (or possibly even the hardware) handles the color bit change transparently - I don't think the application is even aware, because the system handles the dithering. Anyway, I used to have a IIfx with a 21" 4-bit grayscale and a 24-bit color monitor and everything worked (except a couple of games) with no slowdown. --
Note that there's a big difference between having "actively rejected" Win2K and knowing that you are nowhere near ready for it.
Essentially doing a NT4->Win2K upgrade is going to require that your existing WINS, Network Browsing, and MS DNS systems are all working properly *at all of your sites*. I'm willing to guess that this is not the case for > 50% of NT4 shops.
Win2K is also going require a big Exchange (and other Back Office server) upgrade.
The sharper NT admins at these shops probably realize this and are willing to admit that Win2K is not a possiblity until they get the time, money, brainpower, and manpower to do it right. (And wait until MS gets to Service Pack 3 or whateever).
Note that an NT to Linux migration is not exactly a no brainer either, so while you might see a Linux box here and there in an NT enviornment, a knowledgable admin is going to realize that migration is just not in the cards for a while.
My prediction is that NT4 is going to be the new NetWare 3 - it'll be around for a loong time. --
Aren't bandwidth issues a more serious consideration? Since you are talking about "e-commerce", your customer encryption can only be as good as the software out there (128-bit Netscape isn't good enough?), and censorship probably isn't an issue for you. --
Domino servers do not go down when the disk gets full. At least not when your swap is on another partition.
(Linux apparently does lock when the disk fills. At least it did for me with RedHat 5.1.)
Note that in some senses the database capacities are worse than DBase III. Notes is *not* a relational database at all. It's a "unstructured document store", which means it's nothting more than a collection of arbitrarily structured data which you can access through pre-defined queries (views). If your query isn't pre-defined, the full text search is damn excellent.
The document-oriented data store aspects are really the only reason to use Domino instead of a bunch of perl scripts or CGI or ASP. Any of those technologies can probably handle the display aspect much better than the proprietry scripting languages that Notes has. The big "But" is that you necessarily have to build a relational database and jump through a bunch of hoops to get your data out on the page. On Domino, your structured data is the page so this is somewhat easier. On the other hand, if you are querying structured data, Domino is a bit kludgy
The mail features (when you aren't building mail-based workflow apps) are really not top-of-the-line and should be considered as more of a free add-on. Many shops use Domino/Notes with another mail system. (Although, Notes is the most widely deployed corporate mail system, excluding ccMail which is no longer in development.) --
IBM happens to make all of their money on mid-to-high range stuff. Think of their PC division as a loss-leader to keep the user base from forgetting about them.
If IBM is going to push Linux as a midrange solution, I think that's phenominal news, but it's going to have a very small impact on the end user/small business. Having IBM push Linux as a desktop OS is hardly going to make much difference. --
Yes, it should be pointed out that Domino for NetWare was not very well supported or very popular (or very stable). Most NetWare shops run Domino on something else (NT, OS/2, Unix). --
Not that I disbelieve you, but when someone posts "I see BSOD's with NT all the time" without posting specific STOP messages or some indication of what is going on, I'm inclined to right it off as Linux advocacy at it's worst, or maybe if I'm charitable, just someone whose confused NT with 95.
Think if somone posted "Linux Kernel PANICS for me all the time!" You wouldn't give it much thought unless they had some specific debugging info. --
Normally the "MS-Linux" posts here on slashdot read like paranoid ramblings from an AC, but you actually have a pretty well thought out scenario.
But step back a minute and put yourself in Bill Gates' or Steve Ballmer's shoes...
You have been promising your customers certain features such as a directory system, distributed storage, and automatied administration/installation for 5 or 6 years. You've been trying to move the customer base away from their reliance on legacy hardware, software, and drivers and move them to a more stable and modern OS foundation. You've invested milions of dollars in new client and server applications that will take advantage of these operating system features.
All of your plans have been completely public, although you've been lying out your ass about the delivery date for years. Now, you just got a solid beta out the door, and it looks like you are about 3-6 months away from delivering on your plans. The press is ready. The user base is more than ready (so much so that some of them have started to fiddle with unix in their spare time).
And you are going dump and discredit all of the millions of dollars and thousands of man years that you have sunk into Windows 2000 with some secretly-developed, bastardized "MS-Linux" that will neither work well nor integrate at all with the rest of your products?
Even in the depths of all of your Slashdot-induced paranoias are you people really willing to buy this?
Microsoft didn't get where they are by being dopes and changing course when the wind starts blowing a different direction. If Linux becomes a real threat to them, they could cut their prices tomorrow (instead of raising them as they have been), rather than wait *years* in order to transition to Linux/Unix. (Apple bought NeXT in 1997 and still is selling MacOS.)
You should do some digging, because there are known DOS attacks against the AS/400 (which is also probably running manufacturing production or the accounting system or something much more critical than your webserver). A newer AS/400 might come with Lotus Domino, so you would need tighten that up as well. IBM and others make firewalling software for the 400, which you probably should look into (if there isn't something like ipchains built-in).
I know some folks who have put their 400 on the Internet, but considering that very few have done it and there's very little public information out there, I would be exxxtreeeemly cautious about it. With UNIX (or NT to a lesser extent) you at least have a base of knowlegable people who understand networking and security that you can draw on. Many of the really sharp 400 guys (that I've met anyway) seem stuck in the twinax and SNA era. --
There are so many security problems with logging as root that people usually don't even report/investigate them. So you are opening yourself up to a range of things that haven't been tested/thought about by a larger group of people. Just imagine a trojan in KMail or Gimp for example. --
Well, I don't know if the MacOS approach is so wrong -- A couple wrong decisions on a Linux or Windows NT install, and you've got an essentially open box. (What'd you expect - it's supposed to be easy!) On the other hand, if a network demon is running on MacOS it's only because you put it there.
All of this might be mostly trival now for the individual with a dial-up connection. But I've already begun hearing about directed hack attempts (like let's see what's on the boss's computer) against people's personal workstations on Cable modems or DSL. --
And the MIT model railroad club (or whomever) who used the term "hack" to denote a technical stunt were corrupting a word with many older and more varied meanings.
The only definition of "HacK" in my dictionary is the political term (someone who does partisan political work).
If you heard someone call their plumber or car mechanic a "hack", it would probalby be derogatory. Somehow it got twisted on it's head to be an honor in the computer world.
If you can live with political hacks and hack car mechanics and model railroad hackers, you ought to be able to live with Linux hackers and hax0r intruders. --
Most medium-to-larger businesses already "rent" their software in the form of annual maintenace and support agreements, so no news there. And yes, if your company is on a annual plan with Microsoft, they could well be still spending a couple bucks a year for some old MS-DOS PC.
I can't even imagine the hassle that Microsoft (Corel, Lotus, and so on) would have to go through to get that $10-$20 maintance fee out all the individual users and small businesses out there. Hardly likely to happen. --
If I recall correctly, certain versions of Office 2000 (such as the Student Discount version) will have Internet Registration.
Hopefully Microsoft learned something from the "Channels" and "Windows Update" disasters and left that little feature out of the corporate desktop version. --
I really like KDE, too, but my God, it is so boring--it *looks* like a WM written by Germans trying to win enterprise desktops.
Aren't enterprise desktops the Death Star in this little game of galactic domination? For 90% of the computer users out there, their favorite operating system is "the one they make me use at work".
Hopefully, in the future all distributions will have a little menu at the login screen allowing you to pick your Window Manager/Desktop Environment (like Mandrake has now). When that happens, all of these pissant flamewars might finally end, because folks will realize that the only real difference is two mouse clicks and a matter of taste. --
Why is he doing double talk? Simple think in context of DOJ.
Wha? How would the anti-trust Judge even be aware of a speech Ballmer made in Austria? Especially since the only press report is in German. Considering that Microsoft is offering evidence right in front of him in a court of law, I don't think the PR war concerns the judge that much.
What's more likely is that Ballmer is offering PR to a group of somewhat skeptical resellers. If he went in front of a technical audience and shouted "Windows - Right or Wrong!", he'd completely lose crediblity. By conceeding a some minor points, he can make a more convincing case for windows 2000.
{What computer consultants think is much more important to Microsoft's day-to-day business right now than the anti-trust case, which will probably bounce around in court for the next 10 years.} --
Slashdot Mirror
I think you one of the few people that hit the nail on the head here. They are trying to sell a product (an IDE) to people who historically haven't seen much or any need for such a product, no has shown much inclination towards spending money or using non-open source products. There's a really chance that Codewarrior/Linux could bomb big time.
Furthermore, they are trying to sell to a 'community' that has agreed to disagree about any standard beyond by-the-book POSIX. Now that the product's done, your number one problem is providing support for your customers. The problem is that your customers could be running almost anything under the sun in any possible manner.
So it's a no brainer to limit your support initially to the most recent revision of the most popular distribution. They might go bankrupt otherwise. On the other hand, if the product takes off, and their phone jockeys get up to speed, supporting other distributions is the smart thing to do.
--
Actually, Windows installers like to downgrade this and other system DLLs also as well as upgrade them. They also change the time-date stamps on the files so often you don't know what you have or why. Chalk it up to Microsoft letting the ISVs and their own app division put out the service packs for them. (And OS stability suffering for it.)
Linux has it's own form of library hell, as the Codewarrior support example seems to verify, but I'm sure that someone will figure out what 50 things to manually upgrade to get CW running on their slackware box.
I would imagine that installers that automatically prompt you to upgrade your libs are coming. There's no way to create a modern (ie, not Motif or monolithic) Linux app that can easily run on all distributions without it.
However, the only way to avoid a Windows-like DLL jumble in this scenario is a dependancy database that dead on accurate. This sounds like it means deb and not rpm, so maybe redhat should just get over it and adopt deb.
Anyway it shows that Linux has a way to go in certain places, if only because nobody really knows how to package a commercial application for it. Too many more Netscapes, Star Offices, and WordPerfects are definately bad news if you are interested in commercial adoption.
--
That's just what Corel is doing with Debian -- adding value by including wordperfect with the installation. Which is great if you really need WordPerfect, but I would guess the demand isn't enough for them to corner the market that way.
The only thing that RedHat really sells now is the warm fuzzy feeling of a manual and installation support. Once people figure they can do it themselves, their shrinkwrap market is going to dry up immedately.
--
Unlike other software companies, RedHat can't be betting the farm on shrinkwrapped software and the typical upgrade cycle. While RedHat may selling tons of copies now, they market is going to figure out pretty quick that there's no reason to spend $50 when you can spend $3. (And if they try to take their installer proprietary, there's always Debian.)
Where they will make money is on per seat/per year support agreements with companies who deploy Linux. They also can sub-contract to Dell, Compaq for integration and support services. There's also for hire device driver development, system tuning, and per call phone support.
The picture here is that they will be selling services, not so much products. Growth in the services business is much more linear, so I wouldn't expect a huge exponential boom in revenues/stock price.
--
The MacOS (or possibly even the hardware) handles the color bit change transparently - I don't think the application is even aware, because the system handles the dithering. Anyway, I used to have a IIfx with a 21" 4-bit grayscale and a 24-bit color monitor and everything worked (except a couple of games) with no slowdown.
--
Note that there's a big difference between having "actively rejected" Win2K and knowing that you are nowhere near ready for it.
Essentially doing a NT4->Win2K upgrade is going to require that your existing WINS, Network Browsing, and MS DNS systems are all working properly *at all of your sites*. I'm willing to guess that this is not the case for > 50% of NT4 shops.
Win2K is also going require a big Exchange (and other Back Office server) upgrade.
The sharper NT admins at these shops probably realize this and are willing to admit that Win2K is not a possiblity until they get the time, money, brainpower, and manpower to do it right. (And wait until MS gets to Service Pack 3 or whateever).
Note that an NT to Linux migration is not exactly a no brainer either, so while you might see a Linux box here and there in an NT enviornment, a knowledgable admin is going to realize that migration is just not in the cards for a while.
My prediction is that NT4 is going to be the new NetWare 3 - it'll be around for a loong time.
--
Aren't bandwidth issues a more serious consideration? Since you are talking about "e-commerce", your customer encryption can only be as good as the software out there (128-bit Netscape isn't good enough?), and censorship probably isn't an issue for you.
--
Domino servers do not go down when the disk gets full. At least not when your swap is on another partition.
(Linux apparently does lock when the disk fills. At least it did for me with RedHat 5.1.)
Note that in some senses the database capacities are worse than DBase III. Notes is *not* a relational database at all. It's a "unstructured document store", which means it's nothting more than a collection of arbitrarily structured data which you can access through pre-defined queries (views). If your query isn't pre-defined, the full text search is damn excellent.
The document-oriented data store aspects are really the only reason to use Domino instead of a bunch of perl scripts or CGI or ASP. Any of those technologies can probably handle the display aspect much better than the proprietry scripting languages that Notes has. The big "But" is that you necessarily have to build a relational database and jump through a bunch of hoops to get your data out on the page. On Domino, your structured data is the page so this is somewhat easier. On the other hand, if you are querying structured data, Domino is a bit kludgy
The mail features (when you aren't building mail-based workflow apps) are really not top-of-the-line and should be considered as more of a free add-on. Many shops use Domino/Notes with another mail system. (Although, Notes is the most widely deployed corporate mail system, excluding ccMail which is no longer in development.)
--
Correction -- Domino for OS/2 lives on.
--
IBM happens to make all of their money on mid-to-high range stuff. Think of their PC division as a loss-leader to keep the user base from forgetting about them.
If IBM is going to push Linux as a midrange solution, I think that's phenominal news, but it's going to have a very small impact on the end user/small business. Having IBM push Linux as a desktop OS is hardly going to make much difference.
--
Domino isn't really an "NT app", since it started on OS/2 and has run on Unix for years.
(Evaluation downloads are at http://notes.net)
--
Yes, it should be pointed out that Domino for NetWare was not very well supported or very popular (or very stable). Most NetWare shops run Domino on something else (NT, OS/2, Unix).
--
Not that I disbelieve you, but when someone posts "I see BSOD's with NT all the time" without posting specific STOP messages or some indication of what is going on, I'm inclined to right it off as Linux advocacy at it's worst, or maybe if I'm charitable, just someone whose confused NT with 95.
Think if somone posted "Linux Kernel PANICS for me all the time!" You wouldn't give it much thought unless they had some specific debugging info.
--
Normally the "MS-Linux" posts here on slashdot read like paranoid ramblings from an AC, but you actually have a pretty well thought out scenario.
But step back a minute and put yourself in Bill Gates' or Steve Ballmer's shoes...
You have been promising your customers certain features such as a directory system, distributed storage, and automatied administration/installation for 5 or 6 years. You've been trying to move the customer base away from their reliance on legacy hardware, software, and drivers and move them to a more stable and modern OS foundation. You've invested milions of dollars in new client and server applications that will take advantage of these operating system features.
All of your plans have been completely public, although you've been lying out your ass about the delivery date for years. Now, you just got a solid beta out the door, and it looks like you are about 3-6 months away from delivering on your plans. The press is ready. The user base is more than ready (so much so that some of them have started to fiddle with unix in their spare time).
And you are going dump and discredit all of the millions of dollars and thousands of man years that you have sunk into Windows 2000 with some secretly-developed, bastardized "MS-Linux" that will neither work well nor integrate at all with the rest of your products?
Even in the depths of all of your Slashdot-induced paranoias are you people really willing to buy this?
Microsoft didn't get where they are by being dopes and changing course when the wind starts blowing a different direction. If Linux becomes a real threat to them, they could cut their prices tomorrow (instead of raising them as they have been), rather than wait *years* in order to transition to Linux/Unix. (Apple bought NeXT in 1997 and still is selling MacOS.)
--
You should do some digging, because there are known DOS attacks against the AS/400 (which is also probably running manufacturing production or the accounting system or something much more critical than your webserver). A newer AS/400 might come with Lotus Domino, so you would need tighten that up as well. IBM and others make firewalling software for the 400, which you probably should look into (if there isn't something like ipchains built-in).
I know some folks who have put their 400 on the Internet, but considering that very few have done it and there's very little public information out there, I would be exxxtreeeemly cautious about it. With UNIX (or NT to a lesser extent) you at least have a base of knowlegable people who understand networking and security that you can draw on. Many of the really sharp 400 guys (that I've met anyway) seem stuck in the twinax and SNA era.
--
There are so many security problems with logging as root that people usually don't even report/investigate them. So you are opening yourself up to a range of things that haven't been tested/thought about by a larger group of people. Just imagine a trojan in KMail or Gimp for example.
--
Well, I don't know if the MacOS approach is so wrong -- A couple wrong decisions on a Linux or Windows NT install, and you've got an essentially open box. (What'd you expect - it's supposed to be easy!) On the other hand, if a network demon is running on MacOS it's only because you put it there.
All of this might be mostly trival now for the individual with a dial-up connection. But I've already begun hearing about directed hack attempts (like let's see what's on the boss's computer) against people's personal workstations on Cable modems or DSL.
--
And the MIT model railroad club (or whomever) who used the term "hack" to denote a technical stunt were corrupting a word with many older and more varied meanings.
The only definition of "HacK" in my dictionary is the political term (someone who does partisan political work).
If you heard someone call their plumber or car mechanic a "hack", it would probalby be derogatory. Somehow it got twisted on it's head to be an honor in the computer world.
If you can live with political hacks and hack car mechanics and model railroad hackers, you ought to be able to live with Linux hackers and hax0r intruders.
--
I have to say that is one of the most facinating things I've read on slashdot for a while.
Unfortunately, however, I checked it out. My dictionary says the term "jerry built" (or "jury built") goes back to 1860s.
--
Most medium-to-larger businesses already "rent" their software in the form of annual maintenace and support agreements, so no news there. And yes, if your company is on a annual plan with Microsoft, they could well be still spending a couple bucks a year for some old MS-DOS PC.
I can't even imagine the hassle that Microsoft (Corel, Lotus, and so on) would have to go through to get that $10-$20 maintance fee out all the individual users and small businesses out there. Hardly likely to happen.
--
If I recall correctly, certain versions of Office 2000 (such as the Student Discount version) will have Internet Registration.
Hopefully Microsoft learned something from the "Channels" and "Windows Update" disasters and left that little feature out of the corporate desktop version.
--
Buy more crack.
--
Actually NT Workstation has an artifical limit of 256 network connections, which makes it pretty useless as an application server (by design).
--
I really like KDE, too, but my God, it is so boring--it *looks* like a WM written by Germans trying to win enterprise desktops.
Aren't enterprise desktops the Death Star in this little game of galactic domination? For 90% of the computer users out there, their favorite operating system is "the one they make me use at work".
Hopefully, in the future all distributions will have a little menu at the login screen allowing you to pick your Window Manager/Desktop Environment (like Mandrake has now). When that happens, all of these pissant flamewars might finally end, because folks will realize that the only real difference is two mouse clicks and a matter of taste.
--
Why is he doing double talk? Simple think in context of DOJ.
Wha? How would the anti-trust Judge even be aware of a speech Ballmer made in Austria? Especially since the only press report is in German. Considering that Microsoft is offering evidence right in front of him in a court of law, I don't think the PR war concerns the judge that much.
What's more likely is that Ballmer is offering PR to a group of somewhat skeptical resellers. If he went in front of a technical audience and shouted "Windows - Right or Wrong!", he'd completely lose crediblity. By conceeding a some minor points, he can make a more convincing case for windows 2000.
{What computer consultants think is much more important to Microsoft's day-to-day business right now than the anti-trust case, which will probably bounce around in court for the next 10 years.}
--