I go a long way toward agreeing with what you said. However, in advertising,
what is important is not what you and I think, but what other people think.
Even a minority of 10% is important.
To some, the word "nerd" has the negative connotation of a person who is less
socially skilled, as an earlier poster said. Part of good marketing is
avoiding the many small mistakes. Using words with mild negative connotations
is one of the mistakes to avoid.
Understandably, advertisers don't want to advertise in venues that would
associate their product with something even mildly negative, for even a small
minority of people. Advertisers must care for the quality of their branding.
So, it is time for Slashdot managers to take a larger view.
I should have said earlier how much I value Slashdot. That's why these issues
are important to me. I want to see Slashdot grow.
Probably partly because they are intelligent themselves, and because they have
been willing to do the work, the Slashdot editors have created an intelligent
and valuable forum, which I have often found very useful.
I like thinking along the lines of the above post. Thoughtful advertising
makes money and is a benefit to the reader, not an annoyance. Consider the
Google ads, for example.
Unfortunately, one thing is abundantly clear: Neither the Slashdot editors nor
the parent company have any detectable business sense. Did they expect to make
money from ads for high-caffeine tablets? A sensible person would never buy
most of the things they already advertise. A lot of the ads are subtly
offensive toward the reader, as are some elements of Slashdot, such as "News
for nerds". Apparently they aren't aware of the negative connotations of that
word. There is no need to have two slogans. "Stuff that matters" is enough.
The Slashdot editors are communication-challenged. They are people who cannot
be bothered to run a spell checker, or learn English grammar. They are exactly
the type that runs a successful venture into the ground.
That's unfortunate, because Slashdot is an extremely valuable resource.
As I write this, there is a blinking banner ad for RackSpace.
RackSpace should definitely advertise on Slashdot; that's good thinking. But
the ad says, "Win a Gift Certificate" for $300. This is an invitation to you
to embezzle money from your company. Apparently the people who designed the ad
feel comfortable with this, or they are just plain ignorant of the
implications.
I will definitely have a look at the book, probably tomorrow.
A lot of the comments on Slashdot are from people on a very limited budget.
For people who have money, there is an equivalence of money and time. A
book that saves me 10 hours is easily worth $100.
What normally happens, however, is that the books are of very, very poor
quality. Often I can extract all the information useful to me in an entire
book while standing in the bookstore. I once did a survey of perhaps 15
books on Samba and concluded that none of them were complete or
well-written.
When things are working well, the author does as much of the work as
possible to make a subject as easy as possible for the readers. This is
more work than most people or editors want to do. The result is that,
instead of one great book on a subject, there are 15 (as in the case of
Samba), and all are of poor quality, and no one makes much money.
If you do make a second edition, I would be glad to give some free time to
helping with editing.
Since I haven't seen your book, this cannot possibly be a comment about it.
But, in general, I have been amazed at the uniformly low quality of O'Reilly
books. Something is better than nothing. But, the O'Reilly books I've seen
are, in my opinion, only slightly better than rough drafts of outlines to
write a real book. The O'Reilly company doesn't seem to have anyone who
understands editing. Or, maybe the editors find that the writers just don't
want to do the work.
Slashdot, and Slashcode, performed very well distributing news of the
September 11 bombing. It was the best balanced news source I could find. So,
the subject is important.
chromatic, I haven't read the book yet, but I get the impression that what I really need is the second edition.
The history of computing, it seems to me, is everyone spending hundreds of hours puzzling over things that are poorly explained.
Anyhow, I expect that the book is a big improvement over what was available before, which was very little.
I'm very, very impressed with Slashdot. I'd like to set up a Slashcode site, but am trying to avoid the many hours of frustration that is usual for something like this. A book that was extremely complete would be worth at least $200 to me.
It's clear from the design of all of Windows XP, not just WMP8, that Microsoft
does not want you to have privacy. For example, consider how many holes
Windows XP expects you to punch in your firewall.
This anti-privacy attitude is similar to that of the U.S. government. U.S.
government agencies are the biggest, most well-funded surveillance
organizations in the history of the world. For support for that statement see
What should be the Response to
Violence?
At the bottom of the anti-privacy attitude is a feeling of superiority. Below
that is an inability to make successful connections with other people. It's a
kind of mild mental illness that has the characteristic that those who have it
find it difficult to realize that they have it.
First, this laser works when there are no clouds. There is not enough energy
in the beam to punch through the aerosol droplets of water in clouds. It is
necessary to have a clear line of sight.
Second, lasers are VERY dangerous to use when there is a clear line of sight.
The people at whom the U.S. government is shooting may have a mirror.
Remember, corner cubes are mirrors that automatically aim back exactly along
the direction of the arriving beam. They don't need to be pointed. There are
no moving parts. They work at the speed of light.
Third, powerful chemical lasers are very big and bulky weapons. They are also
very expensive. Those who have the mental illness that makes them want to kill
people like to try different methods. However, there may come a time when the
citizens of the U.S. decide that they don't want to use their hard-earned
money to support the activities of sick people.
Fourth, this laser is just one of many, many weapons designed by the U.S.
government. It is a lot like angry children playing. They don't really care if
the weapon is used, or who it is used to kill. They have never learned adult
responsibility. They are mentally bound to their infantile conflict and have
never learned to see other people as beings like themselves.
It just confuses the issues when people assume that the U.S. government has
some kind of healthy rationality about weapons.
What is happening in Australia is a kind of sickness, a governmental sickness.
There are people who like to sneak around, rather than have a real connection
with others. If they can attach themselves to a government that believes in,
or accepts, secrecy, they find that they have endless money, and they can do
whatever they like. Given the nature of secrecy, and the nature of bureacracy,
there is never true accountability in a secret bureacracy.
Angry people often like to cause trouble if they can avoid being held
accountable. Secret troublemaking by government is a dream job for these
people.
Secret agencies in the U.S. are much bigger troublemakers than those in
Australia. The article, What should
be the Response to Violence?, has links to about 600 pages from major news
sources that tell the story. For example, there is a section about a secret
agency of the U.S. government that trained Arabs to be terrorists. Also see
the sections, To understand the present conflict, consider the past,
and Understanding the CIA.
From the second-to-last paragraph of the parent post: "However, saying that
a VP of marketing needs to be able to read code is kind of silly."
I realize it sounds extreme, but I think it is correct.
Either managers understand what is happening, or they don't. A top manager,
who has not programmed and cannot read code, cannot possibly understand the
very varied mental challenges of programming. If he doesn't understand, the
decisions he makes will sometimes be flawed. The dot-com failures are good
examples of this. Billions and billions of dollars were lost.
Sometimes changes to software that sound simple are very complex. Sometimes
complex requirements are simple to program. Top managers need to know what is
a reasonable request and what isn't.
I once wrote a report that showed more than 500 new numbers about sales data,
but was quite simple to program. I was lucky to find an efficient algorithm.
On the other hand there have been times when correcting a seemingly small
shortcoming would have required a major re-write.
Anyone who disagrees with this is invited to supply his or her own explanation
for the dot-com failures.
You didn't sign a contract to give back true ID...
on
Sun Joins RFID Program
·
· Score: 5, Funny
RF ID tags are not a big problem for those who don't want to participate. It's
like Internet browser cookies. You can let anyone put cookies on your hard
drive. But, you didn't sign a contract with web site owners to give back the
same cookies that they recorded. You could have software that gave back, not
the correct cookies, but something subtly different.
Similarly, you can allow them to irradiate your possessions with radio
frequency signals. But you don't have to give back the signals they expect. If
they ping your possessions, your own electronics can respond that you are
carrying three large elephants from the zoo. If anyone questions you about
this, you can confess that you have never stolen anything before, but that you
carried the elephants away in an unusual moment of weakness.
"Every one of those points represents a blunder on the part of someone
other than a coder or lower level manager. Marketing decisions are not made by
entry level coders."
That's exactly right: "Every one of those [amazingly
self-destructive business failures] represents a failure on the part of
someone other than a coder or lower level manager." Whoever failed
destroyed his or her own company and cost a lot of pain and millions of
dollars. The person responsible for the failure: 1) didn't understand the
technology thoroughly, or 2) didn't understand the sociology thoroughly, or 3)
didn't understand either.
Creating software is creating intellectual property. It is a big
intellectual challenge. Creating intellectual property cannot be reduced to
crank-turning. They don't teach it in a university. You have to do it the
old-fashioned way: You have to know what you are doing.
Quoted from the parent post: "Just because someone isn't an expert in a job
doesn't (always) mean they can't manage it."
That may be true in some fields, but not programming. If you aren't a very,
very good programmer, with an intuitive feel for coding, you cannot manage
programming effectively.
If you can't read code quickly, and see all the implications immediately,
you will never know if a coder who works for you is in trouble. You will never
know who is a good coder. You will never understand whether you are getting
quality code, or future junk. You will never understand whether a programmer
has coded himself or herself into a corner.
Here are some examples of bad software development management. It is all
my opinion:
IBM killed OS/2 through marketing stupidity. That was 2 billion dollars
flushed down the drain. They called the product "Warp", a term for something
that has been damaged by being bent. They made many, many other foolish
decisions. They were not attentive to business. They didn't realize the
importance of having plenty of drivers for popular peripherals. Amazing. All
that work of talented people, thrown away. Not just a waste, but immoral.
IBM bought Lotus, and killed Lotus WordPro, and other Lotus products,
through marketing neglect.
WordStar was killed by a new version that lacked some of the features that
customers loved.
WordPerfect Corporation killed WordPerfect by being slow to make a version
with a GUI interface. Novell bought the product, and sold it for $750,000,000
dollars less than it paid about 8 months later to Corel, I seem to
remember.
Novell killed Netware's sales potential by abusing its customers, the
consultants who installed and maintained its products.
Corel slowed Corel Draw's sales by being utterly foolish in marketing. I
talked with [a top manager at Corel] for more than an hour about this. He
agreed fully, but said he could not get the CEO to change things. Corel Draw
is still around, but the company has laid off most of its former staff.
Central Point Software killed PC Tools by bringing out a very, very buggy
version. Before that, Central Point was doing hundreds of millions of dollars
a year in business.
Fastback from 5th Generation Systems was run by a man whose entire business
history was in banking. I talked to him for about 45 minutes. He employed his
daughter to do marketing. She had just graduated from university. He shipped a
bad version, and Fastback died. It is now owned by Symantec, who stopped
marketing the product.
Xerox killed Ventura Publisher's popularity by continuing a design in which
the drive letter and folder name were stored inside its files. This meant that
the files could not be loaded from a diskette backup. Strange, but true.
Corel bought Ventura Publisher, and fixed the file problem. Corel has
slowed the sales of Ventura Publisher by poor marketing and poor design
decisions. People say Ventura Publisher is the best book publishing software,
but sales don't reflect that.
PkWare killed PkZip by continuing a poor quality interface. Now most of
PkWare's business has been taken by WinZip from WinZip Computing.
I've only covered a few of the early failures here. I've said nothing about
the dot-com bombs, which deserve a full investigation.
The biggest cause of software company failure is neglecting the
sociological challenges of marketing software. Usually marketing vice
presidents lack the necessary skills. Often they lack both sociological skills
and technical skills. Part of the marketing manager's job is to create
connections between the customers and the technical staff. Usually marketing
managers have no programming experience, so they have no hope of having
credibility with programmers. Usually marketing managers vastly underestimate
the challenge of knowing the customer's needs.
The second biggest cause of software company failure is not understanding
how to make a useful program. That means partly knowing how customers use
their computers (see the paragraph above), but also thoroughly knowing the
technical issues so that you know what can be and should be coded.
When people say they can manage in a fast-growing technical field without
understanding what their employees are doing, they are talking complete and
utter nonsense.
It is necessary to have a close business relationship with your coders. If
you don't understand what they are doing, you can't be close to them.
Wow, it amazes me that the companies will publicly go to court to try to force
themselves on people.
I only recently learned that my bank was selling my personal information. When
I tried to opt-out, I discovered that they have a difficult procedure to do
so. Also, I have three accounts, and they expect me to opt-out of each one
separately, even though it is the same information.
I would boycott any company that goes to court against opt-in.
Notice the Sybase ad next to the Computerworld article. Will that sell Sybase
products, or damage Sybase by annoying potential customers? The overall
reality is that companies are often self-destructive in the way they interact
with people.
All the O'Reilly books of which I am aware have seemed dis-organized and
lacking in important information. In general, I think computer books are of
very poor quality. Yes, it is true that O'Reilly books are often better than
the alternative, if the alternative is to read sketchy documentation that
comes with some open source software.
The city in which I live, Portland, Oregon, USA, has what is said to be the
biggest bookstore in the world, Powell's. I
went to Powell's technical bookstore and looked at about 20 books on Samba.
ALL of them were very incomplete, as was easily proven by comparing them with
each other. ALL of them were poorly written. Most assumed that you already
knew something about Samba. And, Samba is an important subject; file serving
Microsoft OS clients using Linux is a first step toward reducing dependence on
closed source software.
The measure of good quality in technical books is whether the author has done
everything he or she could possibly to make the subject easy for the reader.
By that measure, very few technical books rate higher than 20%.
There are plenty of books that achieve their bulk with extensive source code
listings. There is a high percentage that promise something on the cover that
they don't deliver. Most indexes are of poor quality.
Next time you are in a technical bookstore, pick up books on unfamiliar
software subjects. Turn to the first few pages. You will find that very few
books have even one paragraph that introduces the subject to those who are new
to it, that explains the importance of the subject, or that explains how the
subject relates to other software.
You would switch away from Windows for these reasons:
1) You don't want to be on the upgrade treadmill, in which you pay
money to Microsoft every year, and continue to get software that needs more
upgrades. One upgrade at $180 may be acceptable, but $180 per year amounts to
$1,800 in ten years.
2) You don't want an operating system with a single point of failure: the
registry. The registry is a primitive database that is, in practice, not
maintainable. If something goes wrong, the suggested fix (from Microsoft) has
been to re-load the operating system and all your programs and configurations
and driver upgrades.
3) You are worried that some of the security risks of Windows were
deliberately put there for surveillance, by order of the U.S. government.
It puzzles you that the United States Department
of Justice case is being settled with little or no penalty to Microsoft.
Would the U.S. government do something this sneaky? Here are links to 600
pages of articles that say yes: What
should be the Response to Violence?
4) You want the flexibility that comes from owning the source code. You
may never use the source code, but if you have a big company, and you find
some kind of problem, having the source code may be the answer. For example,
if there is a bug in a driver for 1,000 pieces of equipment you own, and the
manufacturer won't fix it soon enough for you, you can fix it yourself.
5) You want to avoid invasions of business privacy forced on you by
Microsoft. Microsoft is requiring that the location and owner of each copy
of its XP operating system be disclosed to Microsoft.
If you have just begun reading this discussion, maybe you shouldn't waste your time. Basically, the original article is a troll, or a paid MS public relations stunt, and Slashdot fell for it.
If you must read this discussion, just browse at +5.
I agree that they need a better slogan, but they have done something impressive, which is go through the code looking for security problems, or just iffy code.
The OpenBSD team thinks that security is at the top of importance, and I agree. There needs to be some other name for operating systems that are not secure. Maybe framis. Microsoft Framis XP.
Slashdot Mirror
I go a long way toward agreeing with what you said. However, in advertising, what is important is not what you and I think, but what other people think. Even a minority of 10% is important.
To some, the word "nerd" has the negative connotation of a person who is less socially skilled, as an earlier poster said. Part of good marketing is avoiding the many small mistakes. Using words with mild negative connotations is one of the mistakes to avoid.
Understandably, advertisers don't want to advertise in venues that would associate their product with something even mildly negative, for even a small minority of people. Advertisers must care for the quality of their branding. So, it is time for Slashdot managers to take a larger view.
I should have said earlier how much I value Slashdot. That's why these issues are important to me. I want to see Slashdot grow.
Probably partly because they are intelligent themselves, and because they have been willing to do the work, the Slashdot editors have created an intelligent and valuable forum, which I have often found very useful.
I like thinking along the lines of the above post. Thoughtful advertising makes money and is a benefit to the reader, not an annoyance. Consider the Google ads, for example.
Unfortunately, one thing is abundantly clear: Neither the Slashdot editors nor the parent company have any detectable business sense. Did they expect to make money from ads for high-caffeine tablets? A sensible person would never buy most of the things they already advertise. A lot of the ads are subtly offensive toward the reader, as are some elements of Slashdot, such as "News for nerds". Apparently they aren't aware of the negative connotations of that word. There is no need to have two slogans. "Stuff that matters" is enough.
The Slashdot editors are communication-challenged. They are people who cannot be bothered to run a spell checker, or learn English grammar. They are exactly the type that runs a successful venture into the ground.
That's unfortunate, because Slashdot is an extremely valuable resource.
As I write this, there is a blinking banner ad for RackSpace. RackSpace should definitely advertise on Slashdot; that's good thinking. But the ad says, "Win a Gift Certificate" for $300. This is an invitation to you to embezzle money from your company. Apparently the people who designed the ad feel comfortable with this, or they are just plain ignorant of the implications.
I will definitely have a look at the book, probably tomorrow.
A lot of the comments on Slashdot are from people on a very limited budget. For people who have money, there is an equivalence of money and time. A book that saves me 10 hours is easily worth $100.
What normally happens, however, is that the books are of very, very poor quality. Often I can extract all the information useful to me in an entire book while standing in the bookstore. I once did a survey of perhaps 15 books on Samba and concluded that none of them were complete or well-written.
When things are working well, the author does as much of the work as possible to make a subject as easy as possible for the readers. This is more work than most people or editors want to do. The result is that, instead of one great book on a subject, there are 15 (as in the case of Samba), and all are of poor quality, and no one makes much money.
If you do make a second edition, I would be glad to give some free time to helping with editing.
Since I haven't seen your book, this cannot possibly be a comment about it. But, in general, I have been amazed at the uniformly low quality of O'Reilly books. Something is better than nothing. But, the O'Reilly books I've seen are, in my opinion, only slightly better than rough drafts of outlines to write a real book. The O'Reilly company doesn't seem to have anyone who understands editing. Or, maybe the editors find that the writers just don't want to do the work.
Slashdot, and Slashcode, performed very well distributing news of the September 11 bombing. It was the best balanced news source I could find. So, the subject is important.
chromatic, I haven't read the book yet, but I get the impression that what I really need is the second edition.
The history of computing, it seems to me, is everyone spending hundreds of hours puzzling over things that are poorly explained.
Anyhow, I expect that the book is a big improvement over what was available before, which was very little.
I'm very, very impressed with Slashdot. I'd like to set up a Slashcode site, but am trying to avoid the many hours of frustration that is usual for something like this. A book that was extremely complete would be worth at least $200 to me.
Sounds great to me! Anything that helps get the job done.
It's clear from the design of all of Windows XP, not just WMP8, that Microsoft does not want you to have privacy. For example, consider how many holes Windows XP expects you to punch in your firewall.
This anti-privacy attitude is similar to that of the U.S. government. U.S. government agencies are the biggest, most well-funded surveillance organizations in the history of the world. For support for that statement see What should be the Response to Violence?
At the bottom of the anti-privacy attitude is a feeling of superiority. Below that is an inability to make successful connections with other people. It's a kind of mild mental illness that has the characteristic that those who have it find it difficult to realize that they have it.
Is Ganymede a starting point for a complete centralized configuration tool?
Thoughts:
First, this laser works when there are no clouds. There is not enough energy in the beam to punch through the aerosol droplets of water in clouds. It is necessary to have a clear line of sight.
Second, lasers are VERY dangerous to use when there is a clear line of sight. The people at whom the U.S. government is shooting may have a mirror.
Remember, corner cubes are mirrors that automatically aim back exactly along the direction of the arriving beam. They don't need to be pointed. There are no moving parts. They work at the speed of light.
Third, powerful chemical lasers are very big and bulky weapons. They are also very expensive. Those who have the mental illness that makes them want to kill people like to try different methods. However, there may come a time when the citizens of the U.S. decide that they don't want to use their hard-earned money to support the activities of sick people.
Fourth, this laser is just one of many, many weapons designed by the U.S. government. It is a lot like angry children playing. They don't really care if the weapon is used, or who it is used to kill. They have never learned adult responsibility. They are mentally bound to their infantile conflict and have never learned to see other people as beings like themselves.
It just confuses the issues when people assume that the U.S. government has some kind of healthy rationality about weapons.
More on corruption in the U.S. government: What should be the Response to Violence?
Interesting.
And I got modded down for mentioning it. *grin*
Exactly my thoughts. Thank you.
But, I wish you would get a different name. I feel odd accepting wisdom from someone named "RazzleFrog".
More clearly: Cactus cannot call these Compact Disks because the trademark owner, Philips says they are not.
I suggest another name, maybe "Cruel Deceivers". More stories:
Philips moves to put 'poison' label on protected audio CDs
FEATURE-CD creator Philips blasts labels over protected discs
What is happening in Australia is a kind of sickness, a governmental sickness. There are people who like to sneak around, rather than have a real connection with others. If they can attach themselves to a government that believes in, or accepts, secrecy, they find that they have endless money, and they can do whatever they like. Given the nature of secrecy, and the nature of bureacracy, there is never true accountability in a secret bureacracy.
Angry people often like to cause trouble if they can avoid being held accountable. Secret troublemaking by government is a dream job for these people.
Secret agencies in the U.S. are much bigger troublemakers than those in Australia. The article, What should be the Response to Violence?, has links to about 600 pages from major news sources that tell the story. For example, there is a section about a secret agency of the U.S. government that trained Arabs to be terrorists. Also see the sections, To understand the present conflict, consider the past, and Understanding the CIA.
But, I'm wondering as I read this, what about the ArsDigita product? Is it as good as Slashdot?
Interesting. But causing confusion could be simpler than this. Little boys could switch tags on things that you already own and were around the house.
From the second-to-last paragraph of the parent post: "However, saying that a VP of marketing needs to be able to read code is kind of silly."
I realize it sounds extreme, but I think it is correct.
Either managers understand what is happening, or they don't. A top manager, who has not programmed and cannot read code, cannot possibly understand the very varied mental challenges of programming. If he doesn't understand, the decisions he makes will sometimes be flawed. The dot-com failures are good examples of this. Billions and billions of dollars were lost.
Sometimes changes to software that sound simple are very complex. Sometimes complex requirements are simple to program. Top managers need to know what is a reasonable request and what isn't.
I once wrote a report that showed more than 500 new numbers about sales data, but was quite simple to program. I was lucky to find an efficient algorithm.
On the other hand there have been times when correcting a seemingly small shortcoming would have required a major re-write.
Anyone who disagrees with this is invited to supply his or her own explanation for the dot-com failures.
RF ID tags are not a big problem for those who don't want to participate. It's like Internet browser cookies. You can let anyone put cookies on your hard drive. But, you didn't sign a contract with web site owners to give back the same cookies that they recorded. You could have software that gave back, not the correct cookies, but something subtly different.
Similarly, you can allow them to irradiate your possessions with radio frequency signals. But you don't have to give back the signals they expect. If they ping your possessions, your own electronics can respond that you are carrying three large elephants from the zoo. If anyone questions you about this, you can confess that you have never stolen anything before, but that you carried the elephants away in an unusual moment of weakness.
--
Links to respected news sources show that U.S. government policy contributed to terrorism: What should be the Response to Violence?
"Every one of those points represents a blunder on the part of someone other than a coder or lower level manager. Marketing decisions are not made by entry level coders."
That's exactly right: "Every one of those [amazingly self-destructive business failures] represents a failure on the part of someone other than a coder or lower level manager." Whoever failed destroyed his or her own company and cost a lot of pain and millions of dollars. The person responsible for the failure: 1) didn't understand the technology thoroughly, or 2) didn't understand the sociology thoroughly, or 3) didn't understand either.
Creating software is creating intellectual property. It is a big intellectual challenge. Creating intellectual property cannot be reduced to crank-turning. They don't teach it in a university. You have to do it the old-fashioned way: You have to know what you are doing.
Quoted from the parent post: "Just because someone isn't an expert in a job doesn't (always) mean they can't manage it."
That may be true in some fields, but not programming. If you aren't a very, very good programmer, with an intuitive feel for coding, you cannot manage programming effectively.
If you can't read code quickly, and see all the implications immediately, you will never know if a coder who works for you is in trouble. You will never know who is a good coder. You will never understand whether you are getting quality code, or future junk. You will never understand whether a programmer has coded himself or herself into a corner.
Here are some examples of bad software development management. It is all my opinion:
IBM killed OS/2 through marketing stupidity. That was 2 billion dollars flushed down the drain. They called the product "Warp", a term for something that has been damaged by being bent. They made many, many other foolish decisions. They were not attentive to business. They didn't realize the importance of having plenty of drivers for popular peripherals. Amazing. All that work of talented people, thrown away. Not just a waste, but immoral.
IBM bought Lotus, and killed Lotus WordPro, and other Lotus products, through marketing neglect.
WordStar was killed by a new version that lacked some of the features that customers loved.
WordPerfect Corporation killed WordPerfect by being slow to make a version with a GUI interface. Novell bought the product, and sold it for $750,000,000 dollars less than it paid about 8 months later to Corel, I seem to remember.
Novell killed Netware's sales potential by abusing its customers, the consultants who installed and maintained its products.
Corel slowed Corel Draw's sales by being utterly foolish in marketing. I talked with [a top manager at Corel] for more than an hour about this. He agreed fully, but said he could not get the CEO to change things. Corel Draw is still around, but the company has laid off most of its former staff.
Central Point Software killed PC Tools by bringing out a very, very buggy version. Before that, Central Point was doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in business.
Fastback from 5th Generation Systems was run by a man whose entire business history was in banking. I talked to him for about 45 minutes. He employed his daughter to do marketing. She had just graduated from university. He shipped a bad version, and Fastback died. It is now owned by Symantec, who stopped marketing the product.
Xerox killed Ventura Publisher's popularity by continuing a design in which the drive letter and folder name were stored inside its files. This meant that the files could not be loaded from a diskette backup. Strange, but true.
Corel bought Ventura Publisher, and fixed the file problem. Corel has slowed the sales of Ventura Publisher by poor marketing and poor design decisions. People say Ventura Publisher is the best book publishing software, but sales don't reflect that.
PkWare killed PkZip by continuing a poor quality interface. Now most of PkWare's business has been taken by WinZip from WinZip Computing.
I've only covered a few of the early failures here. I've said nothing about the dot-com bombs, which deserve a full investigation.
The biggest cause of software company failure is neglecting the sociological challenges of marketing software. Usually marketing vice presidents lack the necessary skills. Often they lack both sociological skills and technical skills. Part of the marketing manager's job is to create connections between the customers and the technical staff. Usually marketing managers have no programming experience, so they have no hope of having credibility with programmers. Usually marketing managers vastly underestimate the challenge of knowing the customer's needs.
The second biggest cause of software company failure is not understanding how to make a useful program. That means partly knowing how customers use their computers (see the paragraph above), but also thoroughly knowing the technical issues so that you know what can be and should be coded.
When people say they can manage in a fast-growing technical field without understanding what their employees are doing, they are talking complete and utter nonsense.
It is necessary to have a close business relationship with your coders. If you don't understand what they are doing, you can't be close to them.
--Links to respected news sources show that U.S. government policy contributed to terrorism: What should be the Response to Violence?
Wow, it amazes me that the companies will publicly go to court to try to force themselves on people.
I only recently learned that my bank was selling my personal information. When I tried to opt-out, I discovered that they have a difficult procedure to do so. Also, I have three accounts, and they expect me to opt-out of each one separately, even though it is the same information.
I would boycott any company that goes to court against opt-in.
Notice the Sybase ad next to the Computerworld article. Will that sell Sybase products, or damage Sybase by annoying potential customers? The overall reality is that companies are often self-destructive in the way they interact with people.
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Links to respected news sources show that U.S. government policy contributed to terrorism: What should be the Response to Violence?
All the O'Reilly books of which I am aware have seemed dis-organized and lacking in important information. In general, I think computer books are of very poor quality. Yes, it is true that O'Reilly books are often better than the alternative, if the alternative is to read sketchy documentation that comes with some open source software.
The city in which I live, Portland, Oregon, USA, has what is said to be the biggest bookstore in the world, Powell's. I went to Powell's technical bookstore and looked at about 20 books on Samba. ALL of them were very incomplete, as was easily proven by comparing them with each other. ALL of them were poorly written. Most assumed that you already knew something about Samba. And, Samba is an important subject; file serving Microsoft OS clients using Linux is a first step toward reducing dependence on closed source software.
The measure of good quality in technical books is whether the author has done everything he or she could possibly to make the subject easy for the reader. By that measure, very few technical books rate higher than 20%.
There are plenty of books that achieve their bulk with extensive source code listings. There is a high percentage that promise something on the cover that they don't deliver. Most indexes are of poor quality.
Next time you are in a technical bookstore, pick up books on unfamiliar software subjects. Turn to the first few pages. You will find that very few books have even one paragraph that introduces the subject to those who are new to it, that explains the importance of the subject, or that explains how the subject relates to other software.
You would switch away from Windows for these reasons:
1) You don't want to be on the upgrade treadmill, in which you pay money to Microsoft every year, and continue to get software that needs more upgrades. One upgrade at $180 may be acceptable, but $180 per year amounts to $1,800 in ten years.
2) You don't want an operating system with a single point of failure: the registry. The registry is a primitive database that is, in practice, not maintainable. If something goes wrong, the suggested fix (from Microsoft) has been to re-load the operating system and all your programs and configurations and driver upgrades.
3) You are worried that some of the security risks of Windows were deliberately put there for surveillance, by order of the U.S. government. It puzzles you that the United States Department of Justice case is being settled with little or no penalty to Microsoft. Would the U.S. government do something this sneaky? Here are links to 600 pages of articles that say yes: What should be the Response to Violence?
4) You want the flexibility that comes from owning the source code. You may never use the source code, but if you have a big company, and you find some kind of problem, having the source code may be the answer. For example, if there is a bug in a driver for 1,000 pieces of equipment you own, and the manufacturer won't fix it soon enough for you, you can fix it yourself.
5) You want to avoid invasions of business privacy forced on you by Microsoft. Microsoft is requiring that the location and owner of each copy of its XP operating system be disclosed to Microsoft.
Another Microsoft public relations employee. Look at the name: LinSux.
If you have just begun reading this discussion, maybe you shouldn't waste your time. Basically, the original article is a troll, or a paid MS public relations stunt, and Slashdot fell for it.
If you must read this discussion, just browse at +5.
Excellent. Mod parent up.
I agree that they need a better slogan, but they have done something impressive, which is go through the code looking for security problems, or just iffy code.
The OpenBSD team thinks that security is at the top of importance, and I agree. There needs to be some other name for operating systems that are not secure. Maybe framis. Microsoft Framis XP.
If an OS is not secure, it is just a toy.