I think you're right. I know many won't agree with me but I wish the judge in this case would tell AOL that if they bought a company with the full knowledge of it's competitive problems with MS it's their own responsibility. They should have to prove that they weren't aware of MS's practices or that MS took new non-competitive actions after AOL purchased it.
The courts should not encourage companies to buy other companies based on the income they'd derive from lawsuits.
The US and the states are acting in the public interest"
Sure. It's just a coincidence that the states that refuse to settle happen to be the home of the most powerful of MS competitors.
Why haven't these states sued TicketMaster in the public interest? The reason is that TicketMaster is a true monopoly so their aren't any competitors with enough money to make contributions to the politicians.
"That won't stop people from coming up with inane theories about what netscape could have done"
Yes, any theory that assumes that Netscape was primarily responsible for their own fate is "inane", but any theory that assumes MS was primarily responsible for Netscape's fate is considered logical.
Formula to make a lot of money. Start a company with software that is positioned to compete with Microsoft (if you can get volunteers to write it, so much the better). Even if it makes little or no money, sell it to a large company that competes with Microsoft (or imagines it does) or hates Bill Gates. The new owner probably won't know what to do with it or how to make it profitable, but by then your money will be in the bank.
I agree. They got the Java religion and they paid for it. It's similiar to what happened at Borland when they decided they had to rewrite all their applications in C++ before porting them to Windows. The world doesn't wait while you rewrite your code in the coolest new language.
"The government contractor wants coding standards and lots of documentation, so that if the programmer gets run over by a bus someone else can step in."
It really depends on your government customer. Some want extensive documentation and others don't care. It usually comes down to how much time and money they want to spend.
"There has been a giant sucking sound in PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, and Visual C++ development as most of the prime developers scooted over to Java to see what was going on."
I not sure what you mean by "prime developers" but Java is not the primary development language used for Windows. Sun precluded any chance of that when they sued MS.
In other words you complete the estimation process about the same time that the product is finished. Isn't that true of all projects regardless of the methodology used?
"The main reasons for the loose specification are portability and performance. Operating systems tend to have different threading implementations and it's unlikely that this will change in the near future"
This is one good example of why WORA will never really work.
"Of course the main reason Java got that reputation in the first place was becasue naive developers coded to Microsoft's bastardised Java, and then discovered their code wouldn't run on the real Java from Sun and IBM, etc..."
You and the courts have really insulted Java developers. I doubt that many of them expected MS's windows extensions to Java to be portable to other systems. Those that wanted platform independence probably didn't even bother buying J++.
For the others, Java was just another language to program Windows apps in and MS took the opportunity to make Java work well with COM objects. Don't confuse Sun's agenda with that of Windows developers.
Perhaps now MS's punishment will be more typical for this type of suit: They will have to provide $20 off coupons for Windows XP. Consumers almost never see any cash from these types of suits.
Well, if you wanted to be understood you should have used your first sentence :
"there are far fewer companies doing commercial software now than say 10-15 years ago, as most have been bought/subsumed by larger ones like Microsoft, Adobe, etc."
That's quite clear. On the other hand, I'm not really sure that there are fewer companies doing commercial software today although it seems likely that a higher percentage of products are produced by fewer companies these days than 10-15 years ago.
"Lewis also is incorrect in his criticism of the Software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM) from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon. This method, while far from perfect, has helped many organizations improve their software processes"
So their processes have improved. The real question is whether their software products have improved. I believe in the UL testing model. Each product is evaluated on its own without regard to how it was developed.
All these new age quality models involve grading an organization rather than a product. It's pretty clear that most companies produce products with varying quality even though they were produced by the same organization.
"There are far more jobs available writing order tracking systems and machine control systems than there are writing commercial software, especially now that there are only four or five companies actually doing that."
Four or five companies? I think you're several orders of magnitude off.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is already an open source order tracking system.
2) wish for better hardware for same nice software
3) Go buy a better PC
Of course, there are people that already know they want a Sun workstation and don't bother installing Solaris on a PC first.
"Or is there another marketing strategy that stands a chance of increasing Sun's share of the hardware market by more than 2% pa?"
Well, I think Sun is in a tough position because of the popularity of Linux. I imagine that Solaris on Sun's highest-performance hardware can outperform Linux on a PC, but for non-critical work I think Sun is losing market to Dell etc. because of Linux.
"Every Sunray has a NIC. What make you think that
it does not?"
No, they don't. Check Sun's website. There's a table showing different configurations and the cheapest one has no entry for a NIC. I don't understand why you guys make these claims without checking.
"As far as I know, the Sunrays are extremely low
margin for Sun; I don't think they could sell them any cheaper without increased sales volume."
I agree. This is the major challenge for any vendor attempting to do this. It's hard to compete with the economies of scale that PCs enjoy.
"The key thing here is TCO."
I agree - that's why the Sunray system is not competitive.
"My home PC has the same monitor that I have had for over 10 years, the keyboard and mouse are not the same ones, but could have been. If I had been given a Sunray at work 10 years ago, I might still have the exact same desktop hardware today."
Well, the Sunray has not been available for a period of 10 years so we can't yet determine what percentage will fail during that interval. Since Sun is not offering a 10 year warranty it's a sure bet that they don't expect them to last that long. You're also ignoring the fact that the server can fail or it's performance can become non-competitive in a 10 year period.
"You dont need either. The idea is that everything is done centeraly"
Yes, I know that. That's why I said "Of course". The point is that if those items are not included, the price should be lower.
"No hardware to fail, no software to get misconfigured."
You should have said 'less hardware to fail'. Of course the server hardware can fail too and if it does, the whole system is down.
"The savings is in sysadmin and helpdesk labour, not necessaraly in hardware."
Well, when you consider that most companines would have to retrain their workers to use these systems, it's not clear that support costs will be any less. Moving an application to a server doesn't make it any easier to use. These savings claims have been made for years, but apparently customers are not buying into them since diskless workstations don't have a significant market share.
I just checked the Sun site. The Sun Ray 1 is $399 and is VGA compatible but doesn't include a monitor. Despite everyone's claims that every Sun product comes with a NIC, this one doesn't. It also doesn't include a server license. So it's about $100 more than a cheap PC but it's not clear if you can do anything with it unless you buy a server.
If you want a (non-LCD) monitor too you could get a Sun Ray 100 for $649. It doesn't include a NIC or server license either. A 25 seat setup including server, NICs and licenses will run you $27,841.00 or about $1,100 per seat.
Of course you don't get a hard drive or CD-ROM, so it seems to me pretty expensive considering you can get an entry level PC for about $550 including monitor, hard disk, CD-ROM etc. It's hard to compare performance since the Sun system is doing the bulk of the work on the server.
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I think you're right. I know many won't agree with me but I wish the judge in this case would tell AOL that if they bought a company with the full knowledge of it's competitive problems with MS it's their own responsibility. They should have to prove that they weren't aware of MS's practices or that MS took new non-competitive actions after AOL purchased it.
The courts should not encourage companies to buy other companies based on the income they'd derive from lawsuits.
The US and the states are acting in the public interest"
Sure. It's just a coincidence that the states that refuse to settle happen to be the home of the most powerful of MS competitors.
Why haven't these states sued TicketMaster in the public interest? The reason is that TicketMaster is a true monopoly so their aren't any competitors with enough money to make contributions to the politicians.
"That won't stop people from coming up with inane theories about what netscape could have done"
Yes, any theory that assumes that Netscape was primarily responsible for their own fate is "inane", but any theory that assumes MS was primarily responsible for Netscape's fate is considered logical.
Formula to make a lot of money. Start a company with software that is positioned to compete with Microsoft (if you can get volunteers to write it, so much the better). Even if it makes little or no money, sell it to a large company that competes with Microsoft (or imagines it does) or hates Bill Gates. The new owner probably won't know what to do with it or how to make it profitable, but by then your money will be in the bank.
I agree. They got the Java religion and they paid for it. It's similiar to what happened at Borland when they decided they had to rewrite all their applications in C++ before porting them to Windows. The world doesn't wait while you rewrite your code in the coolest new language.
Perhaps there are conversion issues invovled. Have you tried Word XP's native Courier new at size 36? It doesn't look bad to me.
"The government contractor wants coding standards and lots of documentation, so that if the programmer gets run over by a bus someone else can step in."
It really depends on your government customer. Some want extensive documentation and others don't care. It usually comes down to how much time and money they want to spend.
"The Unified Modelling Language provides ways of modelling every sort of system that you can imagine"
I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit.
"Round 1 was J2EE versus "Windows DNS" (the marketing name for DCOM/MTS)."
J2EE versus Windows Domain Name Server? I think you're a bit confused. In any case your post seems to have little do with mine.
"There has been a giant sucking sound in PowerBuilder, Visual Basic, and Visual C++ development as most of the prime developers scooted over to Java to see what was going on."
I not sure what you mean by "prime developers" but Java is not the primary development language used for Windows. Sun precluded any chance of that when they sued MS.
As I said before, I don't think many J++ users were interested in developing cross-platform apps.
In other words you complete the estimation process about the same time that the product is finished. Isn't that true of all projects regardless of the methodology used?
"The main reasons for the loose specification are portability and performance. Operating systems tend to have different threading implementations and it's unlikely that this will change in the near future"
This is one good example of why WORA will never really work.
"Of course the main reason Java got that reputation in the first place was becasue naive developers coded to Microsoft's bastardised Java, and then discovered their code wouldn't run on the real Java from Sun and IBM, etc..."
You and the courts have really insulted Java developers. I doubt that many of them expected MS's windows extensions to Java to be portable to other systems. Those that wanted platform independence probably didn't even bother buying J++.
For the others, Java was just another language to program Windows apps in and MS took the opportunity to make Java work well with COM objects. Don't confuse Sun's agenda with that of Windows developers.
Perhaps now MS's punishment will be more typical for this type of suit: They will have to provide $20 off coupons for Windows XP. Consumers almost never see any cash from these types of suits.
"If they had no case why would Microsoft think about settling it out of court?"
If the majority of the plantiffs thought they had a case why did they want to settle out of court? It takes two to settle.
Well, if you wanted to be understood you should have used your first sentence :
"there are far fewer companies doing commercial software now than say 10-15 years ago, as most have been bought/subsumed by larger ones like Microsoft, Adobe, etc."
That's quite clear. On the other hand, I'm not really sure that there are fewer companies doing commercial software today although it seems likely that a higher percentage of products are produced by fewer companies these days than 10-15 years ago.
"Lewis also is incorrect in his criticism of the Software Capability Maturity Model (SW-CMM) from the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie-Mellon. This method, while far from perfect, has helped many organizations improve their software processes"
So their processes have improved. The real question is whether their software products have improved. I believe in the UL testing model. Each product is evaluated on its own without regard to how it was developed.
All these new age quality models involve grading an organization rather than a product. It's pretty clear that most companies produce products with varying quality even though they were produced by the same organization.
"There are far more jobs available writing order tracking systems and machine control systems than there are writing commercial software, especially now that there are only four or five companies actually doing that."
Four or five companies? I think you're several orders of magnitude off.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that there is already an open source order tracking system.
I think it's more like:
1) Install Free Solaris on PC
2) wish for better hardware for same nice software
3) Go buy a better PC
Of course, there are people that already know they want a Sun workstation and don't bother installing Solaris on a PC first.
"Or is there another marketing strategy that stands a chance of increasing Sun's share of the hardware market by more than 2% pa?"
Well, I think Sun is in a tough position because of the popularity of Linux. I imagine that Solaris on Sun's highest-performance hardware can outperform Linux on a PC, but for non-critical work I think Sun is losing market to Dell etc. because of Linux.
"Every Sunray has a NIC. What make you think that
it does not?"
No, they don't. Check Sun's website. There's a table showing different configurations and the cheapest one has no entry for a NIC. I don't understand why you guys make these claims without checking.
"As far as I know, the Sunrays are extremely low
margin for Sun; I don't think they could sell them any cheaper without increased sales volume."
I agree. This is the major challenge for any vendor attempting to do this. It's hard to compete with the economies of scale that PCs enjoy.
"The key thing here is TCO."
I agree - that's why the Sunray system is not competitive.
"My home PC has the same monitor that I have had for over 10 years, the keyboard and mouse are not the same ones, but could have been. If I had been given a Sunray at work 10 years ago, I might still have the exact same desktop hardware today."
Well, the Sunray has not been available for a period of 10 years so we can't yet determine what percentage will fail during that interval. Since Sun is not offering a 10 year warranty it's a sure bet that they don't expect them to last that long. You're also ignoring the fact that the server can fail or it's performance can become non-competitive in a 10 year period.
"You dont need either. The idea is that everything is done centeraly"
Yes, I know that. That's why I said "Of course". The point is that if those items are not included, the price should be lower.
"No hardware to fail, no software to get misconfigured."
You should have said 'less hardware to fail'. Of course the server hardware can fail too and if it does, the whole system is down.
"The savings is in sysadmin and helpdesk labour, not necessaraly in hardware."
Well, when you consider that most companines would have to retrain their workers to use these systems, it's not clear that support costs will be any less. Moving an application to a server doesn't make it any easier to use. These savings claims have been made for years, but apparently customers are not buying into them since diskless workstations don't have a significant market share.
I just checked the Sun site. The Sun Ray 1 is $399 and is VGA compatible but doesn't include a monitor. Despite everyone's claims that every Sun product comes with a NIC, this one doesn't. It also doesn't include a server license. So it's about $100 more than a cheap PC but it's not clear if you can do anything with it unless you buy a server.
If you want a (non-LCD) monitor too you could get a Sun Ray 100 for $649. It doesn't include a NIC or server license either. A 25 seat setup including server, NICs and licenses will run you $27,841.00 or about $1,100 per seat.
Of course you don't get a hard drive or CD-ROM, so it seems to me pretty expensive considering you can get an entry level PC for about $550 including monitor, hard disk, CD-ROM etc. It's hard to compare performance since the Sun system is doing the bulk of the work on the server.
Are they actually selling these terminals today at $400 including monitor? Can you buy them without the server?
As long as customers don't mind spending a lot more money on Sun systems. I don't buy it. They'll either stick with Windows or adopt Linux.