I would guess that "the slashdot crowd" (i.e. geeks that still play with Lego, and tend to buy more of it than the average 8-year-old's parents) isn't nearly a large enough market to expect to make any money from.
I wonder if the Lego folks should consider looking into multiple marketing channels? Continue the mass delivery channel for their traditional products, and then look for other channels for niche products (Mindstorms, for geeks). If they could eliminate a lot of the marketing and distribution expenses, perhaps they could continue to manufacture smaller volumes of these products profitably. Sell them online, or through a small number of key retailers in major markets.
Yes, there is often a happy medium between completely rewriting the whole codebase and continuing to hack it up. There have always been disciplined ways to steadily improve existing code over time.
The latest buzzword for this is Refactoring. There are some excellent published materials on this topic. We've finally reached a stage where verbal discussion of good software engineering techniques have reached a point where we can write intelligently about the topic using common terminology. See refactoring.com and The First Wiki for some good online starting-points.
I expect that it is true that commercial software does a generally better job than open source software at error handling. This is probably even measurable: run comparable software products under similar usage load, and collect the errors generated (reported or experienced by users). I haven't tried such an experiment myself.
I don't why we (we = open source enthusiasts) should feel particularly worried about it at the moment. For most applications, the commercial alternative has a vastly larger user base than the open-source equivalent. And since these users are paying for their software, they are going to expect that there is a vendor who will respond to their concerns.
Customer service operations are very expensive. So it is very much in the interest of the commercial vendor to reduce the error rate to the level where the load on customer service is financially tolerable (this is not the same as zero).
Fixing obscure bugs is not the most exciting technical endeavor, and skilled engineers are more willing to do this work if you pay them...
As I said, I don't think we should feel bad about this state of affairs. A more appropriate line of discussion would be: What can the open source community do to create an environment where a higher degree of quality is met consistently for open source software products? Are there tools that we could build that will help? Non-intrusive processes that we can impose on one another? The Perl community in particular has an effort underway to establish a consistent level of testing for all the modules that are released on CPAN. Is that a worthwhile model?
In our current financial environment, all the alternatives you described - checks, debit cards, online shopping, automatic bill pay, direct deposit - are all more expensive to process than cash. As a consumer you might not directly experience the added expense, but it's there. Checks cost up to a dollar or two for banks to handle. For credit and debit cards, the merchant generally pays - up to 3% or more for credit cards, plus a fixed fee, less for debit cards. Online bill pay and direct deposit are the cheapest, since these patch directly into the banks' clearinghouse network, but still as much as 20 cents or so.
While these costs exist in the system, we will never get away from cash for low-value transactions.
There is also a measure of financial risk taken by the merchant for non-cash transactions. The costs above don't include any form of insurance against fraud or other losses. With cash you don't incur the same sort of risk.
We have a long way to go before cash can be eliminated. A ubiquitous, world-wide, real-time on-line transaction processing system might do it.
Slashdot Mirror
I would guess that "the slashdot crowd" (i.e. geeks that still play with Lego, and tend to buy more of it than the average 8-year-old's parents) isn't nearly a large enough market to expect to make any money from.
I wonder if the Lego folks should consider looking into multiple marketing channels? Continue the mass delivery channel for their traditional products, and then look for other channels for niche products (Mindstorms, for geeks). If they could eliminate a lot of the marketing and distribution expenses, perhaps they could continue to manufacture smaller volumes of these products profitably. Sell them online, or through a small number of key retailers in major markets.
Yes, there is often a happy medium between completely rewriting the whole codebase and continuing to hack it up. There have always been disciplined ways to steadily improve existing code over time.
The latest buzzword for this is Refactoring. There are some excellent published materials on this topic. We've finally reached a stage where verbal discussion of good software engineering techniques have reached a point where we can write intelligently about the topic using common terminology. See refactoring.com and The First Wiki for some good online starting-points.
I expect that it is true that commercial software does a generally better job than open source software at error handling. This is probably even measurable: run comparable software products under similar usage load, and collect the errors generated (reported or experienced by users). I haven't tried such an experiment myself.
I don't why we (we = open source enthusiasts) should feel particularly worried about it at the moment. For most applications, the commercial alternative has a vastly larger user base than the open-source equivalent. And since these users are paying for their software, they are going to expect that there is a vendor who will respond to their concerns.
Customer service operations are very expensive. So it is very much in the interest of the commercial vendor to reduce the error rate to the level where the load on customer service is financially tolerable (this is not the same as zero).
Fixing obscure bugs is not the most exciting technical endeavor, and skilled engineers are more willing to do this work if you pay them...
As I said, I don't think we should feel bad about this state of affairs. A more appropriate line of discussion would be: What can the open source community do to create an environment where a higher degree of quality is met consistently for open source software products? Are there tools that we could build that will help? Non-intrusive processes that we can impose on one another? The Perl community in particular has an effort underway to establish a consistent level of testing for all the modules that are released on CPAN. Is that a worthwhile model?
In our current financial environment, all the alternatives you described - checks, debit cards, online shopping, automatic bill pay, direct deposit - are all more expensive to process than cash. As a consumer you might not directly experience the added expense, but it's there. Checks cost up to a dollar or two for banks to handle. For credit and debit cards, the merchant generally pays - up to 3% or more for credit cards, plus a fixed fee, less for debit cards. Online bill pay and direct deposit are the cheapest, since these patch directly into the banks' clearinghouse network, but still as much as 20 cents or so.
While these costs exist in the system, we will never get away from cash for low-value transactions.
There is also a measure of financial risk taken by the merchant for non-cash transactions. The costs above don't include any form of insurance against fraud or other losses. With cash you don't incur the same sort of risk.
We have a long way to go before cash can be eliminated. A ubiquitous, world-wide, real-time on-line transaction processing system might do it.
Dencon - expensive, height-adjustable, high-tech look, very cool
Sligh - traditional look, "executive desk" style
Jesper - also a fairly traditional look
Techline - loads of options here, from traditional to chic (check out the Atelier line)