I think that's a smart move by Oracle. From a long time ago they have allowed full download of their databases for testing purposes. I have a copy of Oracle 9 running in my machine to make tests of software I develop. So my customers with Oracle have better service. Probably some copies of the database will end up as production units, but few companies will trust its bussiness data to an illegal piece of software.
So Oracle has realized that the free availability hasn't cut into their sales. The next step is logical. You give away an entry-level database (entry-level users would probably use an illegal copy, or worse, an open source db), and then wait till the needs grow and they need the real thing. If the needs don't grow, well, who need those little-bussiness-that-don't-grow as customers, anyway ?
I see the thing as mainly good for the users and developers. Of course it'll cut into Open Source databases, but they'll still have their niche. After all, you should be careful with what you do with this free Oracle. Oracle can change its mind in two year's time and leave you with all your data and processes in a database that won't be supported or upgraded anymore. You'd have fallen into Oracle's trap. That's much more difficult to happen with an Open Source database.
If the technology is so user-unfriendly, then it'll be defeated by the users, sorry, the customers. The customers already have a technology that works, called DVD. It works good enough for most of them, so you have to give them reasons to upgrade (Bill should know a thing or two about it, from a certain product he has, called Office). If you don't, you won't sell a Blue-Ray player ever.
Well, the studios could refuse to release the films in DVD format, but, you know, that's kind of difficult till you have a big customer base. After all, it's your main revenue source, you don't play with that. And then there is piracy. No amount of protection is going to protect the content, as you will always have at least the analog output to recode, and most likely a tweaked Blue-Ray player to play with.
So I don't particularly care one way or the other. If they protect too much, they'll never win market share, and hard disks are not the only competitor that they will find. Think cheap memory cards, for example. I personally think that these standards are a bit early in the day, driven more by the desire of selling us again the same old films in the shiny new format, than by any customer desire. If they really cared about the customer they would quit displaying stupid screens at the beginning of the DVDs that you cannot skip. I regularly copy my DVDs and you know what, the copies are more used by my family than the originals, because you simply pop the disk and the film starts, no menus, no nothing. So that's a customer desire (my family being fairly typical), and it's not even being considered.
Note to the studios: Do you want to end piracy? Sell DVDs at 3$ from the same day of the first screening, and you are done. You'll even win probably more money than now, as people will buy the cheap DVDs before their friend tell them that the film is no good (what happens with most films nowadays, which was the last film that left you Wow! ? For me it was the Matrix, and that's some years away).
They say that in a few years a human-engineered microorganism will be created with a selected set of genes. All very well, and I suppose that won't be released into the wild. But I bet that if they ever do it (release it into the wild), it'll last about 5 minutes against its evolution-designed competitors and generally hostile environment.
The same happens to the IT systems. Legacy systems may be old (how can software be old, anyway?), incompatible, user-unfriendly, and whatever else. But a basic fact so often overlooked is that they have for many years been adapting (or rather being adapted) to their environment (users, other programs, etc). If you look at legacy code you always find odd-looking "if's" with comments like "It must do this to work", or "The other program expects it that way", or no comment at all. The point is that all this spaguetti code has beed polished, adapted and perfected by the work of programmers guided by the reality, as opposed to designers guided by their own desires and incomplete knowledge of the problem.
So the point is that _all_ scratch designed systems will lose all that ancient knowledge embedded into the code, and there is nothing you can do about it (inspecting all the code would be impossible, and the knowledge can sometimes be into OS parameters, shell scripts, scraps of paper with procedures in the drawers of remote users, or even in the brains of world-scattered users) So the only thing to do is to have it into account when designing a new system of some complexity, and knowing that it will take you like a year at least of real running till it's at the same level of functionality as the old. So probably you'll need a year of overlaping systems (perish the thougth).
When presented with that reality most managers will think again if they really need the new system, and at least will be prepared for the problems ahead.
But of course that might not sell the new system, so who's interested in telling those truths to management. Certainly not the seller's marketing dept, their concealing habilities much helped by the fact that they are themselves blissfully unaware of the problem.
After some months of trying to communicate with the extrange visitor, the Elder Martians just wished it away.
Basic darwinism, but inefficiency has its charms.
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
Well of course if the environment suddenly changes to a more demanding one, the surviving entities (in this case bussiness) will be fitter. Or, rather, only the ones that are already fit, or manage to streamline will survive. But streamlining means shedding all fat from the company. The author seems to think that all companies miraculously converted into lean and mean demons of efficiency. The voice of the failed companies is not to be heard. After all, one characteristic of deceased companies is their usual mutism.
And even if all companies manage to streamline, then a lot of people is having no job. Because, let's face it, a lot of people have no place in a really lean company. What about all those lazy people idling near the coffe machines in all big enterprises? What about all the procrastinators, the inefficient, the (as Tom Sharpe would put it) overacting underachievers ? What about middle managers? What about myself ?
And they have children, spouse, all that kind of things. They need the money as much as the efficient person does. In fact, probably much more so, as they have more free time. In an inefficient market these people will suck their living from the fruits of the labor of the really efficient, and so won't end up in the streets committing evil deeds, or becoming politicians.
So the merits of a really streamlined bussiness market is in my opinion much overblown. There is some quiet and relaxed quelity of living in an inefficient world, as any East-German, nostalgic of the old central-economy times will tell you.
Convergence will happen, just the other way around. The DVD player will end up taking more and more functions. Think a DVD recorder with Tivo functionality, and then add an Ethernet port to be able to load films/music from a home network. Then you have a computer, just add functions at will, but it'll be a DVD for everybody.
Of course the problem is... it won't run Windows. Tut, tut, tut. I hope MS will make some effort to convince the families that the TCO of the DVD is much higher if it's not running Windows.
If I had a dime for every new display technology (or other kind of cool technologies) that gets in the papers, I could go to the same clubs of Warren Buffet. But if I had it for the technologies that actually reach me as a consumer, I could barely buy a film ticket, depending on city.
I don't know exactly why it is but it's a fact. I'm thinking of making a list. It may make for funny reading ten years from now.
You find some counterfeits, you track the printer, and then what? It's been sold over the counter somewhere to who-knows-whom. That's just a publicity stunt to avoid being ever held responsible for anything done with their printers.
I heard at the time (when Windows started making the rounds as a gadget on top of MS-DOS), that Microsoft had pleaded with the big MS-DOS third-party software suppliers to port their office programs to Windows, and they had showed little interest or downright declined. They wanted to wait till that "Windows" thing was a success before they committed themselves to anything. So MS, knowing that in the absence of an office suite, the success of Windows was almost impossible, decided to develop the office suite themselves, and the rest is history. Is that true? Has anybody heard of it or knows more about that particular issue?
Well, that's just my point. I tried to say that venture capitalists usually seek big returns, in exchange for taking big risk (i.e. losing the investment). You can make a very decent living by giving consultancy to companies about OSS, or running helpdesks, but that cannot be a pot of gold. Reason is obvious, you can charge a fat buck for an hour of consulting, but you have to deliver the hour, and days have only 25 hours, give or take one. You can have a company filled with people that will give you a share of their fat hourly fees, but then you have to provide infrastructure for all that people. So it's a slow bussiness. It's simply not the same economy of scale as doing a nice program once, and figuratively sleep forever while copies are sold and money is printed.
In fact, I guess what venture capitalists don't realize (and it's a proof of my pride that I don't even blink when I counsel people with are probably much smarter than myself), is that Microsoft and Red Hat, although seemingly both are software things, in fact are in completely different sectors. Red Hat is in the league of the Arthur Andersens of this world. Microsoft (and Oracle, etc) is really in entertainment. Entertainment is risky but when you strike gold it pays wonderfully. Microsoft produced a blockbuster some time ago, and now everybody has to pay every time they want to see it again. It will make money till the tastes of the people change. You can invest in similar companies with the same closed source model and expect a similar success that makes you rich and compensate the losses of the other investments. But in OSS there is simply no such big bucks waiting. But who am I to argue. Perhaps they (the venture capitalists) are well aware of the fact. Certainly they have more money than I do, so probaly are not complete morons:o).
I'm all for open source software, to the point of administering a sourceforge project. But. But I cannot think open source is anything to get rich with. Can you run a bussiness ? Sure. Can you make money with it ? Sure. But can you make a lot of money with it ? Hardly.
I guess venture capitalist are using the flawed logic:
1. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, are making gazillions of dollars from software.
2. It seems like Open Source software can replace or at least successfully compete with this behemoths.
3. Somehow, some part of the gazillions of dollars that the aforesaid firms are not going to make, will make it to the Open Source companies.
Point 3 is simply not going to happen. The money will quietly remain in the companies using OSS. They should refocus their strategy and perhaps invest in those companies (the ones heavily using OSS).
... never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
It's quite likely they cannot really find the code. Anybody that has worked at a big corporation knows that (If you haven't, just read the complete Dilbert strips, and you'll have an idea).
If you have a collective of workers, and fire a lot of the worse-paid, the mean salary will rise. Usually are the lower tech jobs that are outsourced overseas (at first). You just add two and two together.
I mean, it's like "I transfer you 3 grand and then you mail me a password to a controller server", or something like that ? I guess you have to be mighty sure of the delivery of the goods to enter in such deals.
I just ended a vacation in China, and pre-paid SIM cards could be obtained over the counter at the local supermarket with no ID check or anything. Then you could recharge it with other cards similarly bought over the counter. So how's one supposed to control anything when you don't know who's sending and to whom?
how does Japan manage to stay lightyears ahead of everyone else in wireless?
A very densely populated country, with concentrated cities that allow a high level of money return for every repeater installed. Also, more repeaters imply less distance to the possible target, which allows for more data troughoutput^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hspeed. A gadget-loving population also helps.
Who comes up with these names?
Uh? That should be self-evident^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hobvious. Committees, of course.
Indeed, we think there is something wrong if our neighborhoods and educational institutions do not reflect the incredible diversity of America, and we seek to remedy the imbalance.
Are we speaking about the same country? Where people drifts to 'hoods with the same economic/cultural/religious background? Is he being sarcastic?
At the very least, given the big number of hardware companies in those countries (added those of Taiwan that probably wasn't in the agreement because China doesn't recognize it, but whose interests lie in the same line), this agreement will help improve Linux driver support.
The worst development job I ever had was converting some old accounting application into "modern" COBOL and a database, some 15 years ago. That's not too much fun in any case, but it can be all right. The real problem was that I was told from the beginning that the application would never be used. It was asked for only because it was a big corporation and the conversion was in that year's budged. Really. Dilbert would have found himself at home there.
I should have been happy, because that meant that almost no testing would be done, and so the work be an easy bill (I work as an independent contractor). But somehow, the fact of knowing that the work was futile took all the fun out of doing it. Kind of like making holes to fill them up later. I was very happy to have it finished.
The best part, of course was that not a single bug has ever been reported in that application.
Nobody can estimate the price tag of sending a earthling to Mars. So the 1 trillion figure is a good way of saying "it'll be very, very, very expensive". In fact, the figure is too round to be taken seriously, and the real price could be much lower, but also much higher.
New information technologies only add to stress. The more up-to-date information you have, the more you are requested to be up-to-date. The mails have a tendency to arrive at the same time, and you are considered rude, or worse, improductive, if you leave them a long time without answering. The more ways you have to comunicate, the bigger are your chances to be interrupted at the worst possible moment (think cell phone). The easier the communication is, the easier it's to consider that you can work everywhere, home, plane, traffic jam...
The demands on your time and attention only grow with technology, and so stress grows. It's a bit of an edge example, but I've been a stock investor for the last 20 years, and it was much more peaceful when I only could check the quotes once a day in the morning papers.
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I think that's a smart move by Oracle. From a long time ago they have allowed full download of their databases for testing purposes. I have a copy of Oracle 9 running in my machine to make tests of software I develop. So my customers with Oracle have better service. Probably some copies of the database will end up as production units, but few companies will trust its bussiness data to an illegal piece of software.
So Oracle has realized that the free availability hasn't cut into their sales. The next step is logical. You give away an entry-level database (entry-level users would probably use an illegal copy, or worse, an open source db), and then wait till the needs grow and they need the real thing. If the needs don't grow, well, who need those little-bussiness-that-don't-grow as customers, anyway ?
I see the thing as mainly good for the users and developers. Of course it'll cut into Open Source databases, but they'll still have their niche. After all, you should be careful with what you do with this free Oracle. Oracle can change its mind in two year's time and leave you with all your data and processes in a database that won't be supported or upgraded anymore. You'd have fallen into Oracle's trap. That's much more difficult to happen with an Open Source database.
If the technology is so user-unfriendly, then it'll be defeated by the users, sorry, the customers. The customers already have a technology that works, called DVD. It works good enough for most of them, so you have to give them reasons to upgrade (Bill should know a thing or two about it, from a certain product he has, called Office). If you don't, you won't sell a Blue-Ray player ever.
Well, the studios could refuse to release the films in DVD format, but, you know, that's kind of difficult till you have a big customer base. After all, it's your main revenue source, you don't play with that. And then there is piracy. No amount of protection is going to protect the content, as you will always have at least the analog output to recode, and most likely a tweaked Blue-Ray player to play with.
So I don't particularly care one way or the other. If they protect too much, they'll never win market share, and hard disks are not the only competitor that they will find. Think cheap memory cards, for example. I personally think that these standards are a bit early in the day, driven more by the desire of selling us again the same old films in the shiny new format, than by any customer desire. If they really cared about the customer they would quit displaying stupid screens at the beginning of the DVDs that you cannot skip. I regularly copy my DVDs and you know what, the copies are more used by my family than the originals, because you simply pop the disk and the film starts, no menus, no nothing. So that's a customer desire (my family being fairly typical), and it's not even being considered.
Note to the studios: Do you want to end piracy? Sell DVDs at 3$ from the same day of the first screening, and you are done. You'll even win probably more money than now, as people will buy the cheap DVDs before their friend tell them that the film is no good (what happens with most films nowadays, which was the last film that left you Wow! ? For me it was the Matrix, and that's some years away).
They say that in a few years a human-engineered microorganism will be created with a selected set of genes. All very well, and I suppose that won't be released into the wild. But I bet that if they ever do it (release it into the wild), it'll last about 5 minutes against its evolution-designed competitors and generally hostile environment.
The same happens to the IT systems. Legacy systems may be old (how can software be old, anyway?), incompatible, user-unfriendly, and whatever else. But a basic fact so often overlooked is that they have for many years been adapting (or rather being adapted) to their environment (users, other programs, etc). If you look at legacy code you always find odd-looking "if's" with comments like "It must do this to work", or "The other program expects it that way", or no comment at all. The point is that all this spaguetti code has beed polished, adapted and perfected by the work of programmers guided by the reality, as opposed to designers guided by their own desires and incomplete knowledge of the problem.
So the point is that _all_ scratch designed systems will lose all that ancient knowledge embedded into the code, and there is nothing you can do about it (inspecting all the code would be impossible, and the knowledge can sometimes be into OS parameters, shell scripts, scraps of paper with procedures in the drawers of remote users, or even in the brains of world-scattered users) So the only thing to do is to have it into account when designing a new system of some complexity, and knowing that it will take you like a year at least of real running till it's at the same level of functionality as the old. So probably you'll need a year of overlaping systems (perish the thougth).
When presented with that reality most managers will think again if they really need the new system, and at least will be prepared for the problems ahead.
But of course that might not sell the new system, so who's interested in telling those truths to management. Certainly not the seller's marketing dept, their concealing habilities much helped by the fact that they are themselves blissfully unaware of the problem.
After some months of trying to communicate with the extrange visitor, the Elder Martians just wished it away.
Well of course if the environment suddenly changes to a more demanding one, the surviving entities (in this case bussiness) will be fitter. Or, rather, only the ones that are already fit, or manage to streamline will survive. But streamlining means shedding all fat from the company. The author seems to think that all companies miraculously converted into lean and mean demons of efficiency. The voice of the failed companies is not to be heard. After all, one characteristic of deceased companies is their usual mutism.
And even if all companies manage to streamline, then a lot of people is having no job. Because, let's face it, a lot of people have no place in a really lean company. What about all those lazy people idling near the coffe machines in all big enterprises? What about all the procrastinators, the inefficient, the (as Tom Sharpe would put it) overacting underachievers ? What about middle managers? What about myself ?
And they have children, spouse, all that kind of things. They need the money as much as the efficient person does. In fact, probably much more so, as they have more free time. In an inefficient market these people will suck their living from the fruits of the labor of the really efficient, and so won't end up in the streets committing evil deeds, or becoming politicians.
So the merits of a really streamlined bussiness market is in my opinion much overblown. There is some quiet and relaxed quelity of living in an inefficient world, as any East-German, nostalgic of the old central-economy times will tell you.
Convergence will happen, just the other way around. The DVD player will end up taking more and more functions. Think a DVD recorder with Tivo functionality, and then add an Ethernet port to be able to load films/music from a home network. Then you have a computer, just add functions at will, but it'll be a DVD for everybody.
Of course the problem is... it won't run Windows. Tut, tut, tut. I hope MS will make some effort to convince the families that the TCO of the DVD is much higher if it's not running Windows.
How cool wouldn't it be to be able to burn the label on your cd using the same laser you used to burn the cd in the first place?
Marginally cool. If at all.
Well, I just didn't want to share the clubs with Bill Gates ;o)
If I had a dime for every new display technology (or other kind of cool technologies) that gets in the papers, I could go to the same clubs of Warren Buffet. But if I had it for the technologies that actually reach me as a consumer, I could barely buy a film ticket, depending on city.
I don't know exactly why it is but it's a fact. I'm thinking of making a list. It may make for funny reading ten years from now.
You find some counterfeits, you track the printer, and then what? It's been sold over the counter somewhere to who-knows-whom. That's just a publicity stunt to avoid being ever held responsible for anything done with their printers.
I heard at the time (when Windows started making the rounds as a gadget on top of MS-DOS), that Microsoft had pleaded with the big MS-DOS third-party software suppliers to port their office programs to Windows, and they had showed little interest or downright declined. They wanted to wait till that "Windows" thing was a success before they committed themselves to anything. So MS, knowing that in the absence of an office suite, the success of Windows was almost impossible, decided to develop the office suite themselves, and the rest is history. Is that true? Has anybody heard of it or knows more about that particular issue?
Well, that's just my point. I tried to say that venture capitalists usually seek big returns, in exchange for taking big risk (i.e. losing the investment). You can make a very decent living by giving consultancy to companies about OSS, or running helpdesks, but that cannot be a pot of gold. Reason is obvious, you can charge a fat buck for an hour of consulting, but you have to deliver the hour, and days have only 25 hours, give or take one. You can have a company filled with people that will give you a share of their fat hourly fees, but then you have to provide infrastructure for all that people. So it's a slow bussiness. It's simply not the same economy of scale as doing a nice program once, and figuratively sleep forever while copies are sold and money is printed.
:o).
In fact, I guess what venture capitalists don't realize (and it's a proof of my pride that I don't even blink when I counsel people with are probably much smarter than myself), is that Microsoft and Red Hat, although seemingly both are software things, in fact are in completely different sectors. Red Hat is in the league of the Arthur Andersens of this world. Microsoft (and Oracle, etc) is really in entertainment. Entertainment is risky but when you strike gold it pays wonderfully. Microsoft produced a blockbuster some time ago, and now everybody has to pay every time they want to see it again. It will make money till the tastes of the people change. You can invest in similar companies with the same closed source model and expect a similar success that makes you rich and compensate the losses of the other investments. But in OSS there is simply no such big bucks waiting. But who am I to argue. Perhaps they (the venture capitalists) are well aware of the fact. Certainly they have more money than I do, so probaly are not complete morons
I'm all for open source software, to the point of administering a sourceforge project. But. But I cannot think open source is anything to get rich with. Can you run a bussiness ? Sure. Can you make money with it ? Sure. But can you make a lot of money with it ? Hardly.
I guess venture capitalist are using the flawed logic:
1. Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, are making gazillions of dollars from software.
2. It seems like Open Source software can replace or at least successfully compete with this behemoths.
3. Somehow, some part of the gazillions of dollars that the aforesaid firms are not going to make, will make it to the Open Source companies.
Point 3 is simply not going to happen. The money will quietly remain in the companies using OSS. They should refocus their strategy and perhaps invest in those companies (the ones heavily using OSS).
... never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
It's quite likely they cannot really find the code. Anybody that has worked at a big corporation knows that (If you haven't, just read the complete Dilbert strips, and you'll have an idea).
Is this really a problem or just a natural progression?
Well, much depends on if you are a Korean music retailer or not.
If you have a collective of workers, and fire a lot of the worse-paid, the mean salary will rise. Usually are the lower tech jobs that are outsourced overseas (at first). You just add two and two together.
I mean, it's like "I transfer you 3 grand and then you mail me a password to a controller server", or something like that ? I guess you have to be mighty sure of the delivery of the goods to enter in such deals.
I just ended a vacation in China, and pre-paid SIM cards could be obtained over the counter at the local supermarket with no ID check or anything. Then you could recharge it with other cards similarly bought over the counter. So how's one supposed to control anything when you don't know who's sending and to whom?
how does Japan manage to stay lightyears ahead of everyone else in wireless?
A very densely populated country, with concentrated cities that allow a high level of money return for every repeater installed. Also, more repeaters imply less distance to the possible target, which allows for more data troughoutput^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hspeed. A gadget-loving population also helps.
Who comes up with these names?
Uh? That should be self-evident^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hobvious. Committees, of course.
(revised by the anti-pedantic spell checker)
Indeed, we think there is something wrong if our neighborhoods and educational institutions do not reflect the incredible diversity of America, and we seek to remedy the imbalance.
.....
Are we speaking about the same country? Where people drifts to 'hoods with the same economic/cultural/religious background? Is he being sarcastic?
Or
Is this article really just a big troll?
At the very least, given the big number of hardware companies in those countries (added those of Taiwan that probably wasn't in the agreement because China doesn't recognize it, but whose interests lie in the same line), this agreement will help improve Linux driver support.
That's good news and no mistake.
I should have been happy, because that meant that almost no testing would be done, and so the work be an easy bill (I work as an independent contractor). But somehow, the fact of knowing that the work was futile took all the fun out of doing it. Kind of like making holes to fill them up later. I was very happy to have it finished.
The best part, of course was that not a single bug has ever been reported in that application.
So it'll produce infinitesimal, almost undetectable, amounts of energy. Very handy. Will hardly lower gas prices, though.
New information technologies only add to stress. The more up-to-date information you have, the more you are requested to be up-to-date. The mails have a tendency to arrive at the same time, and you are considered rude, or worse, improductive, if you leave them a long time without answering. The more ways you have to comunicate, the bigger are your chances to be interrupted at the worst possible moment (think cell phone). The easier the communication is, the easier it's to consider that you can work everywhere, home, plane, traffic jam...
The demands on your time and attention only grow with technology, and so stress grows. It's a bit of an edge example, but I've been a stock investor for the last 20 years, and it was much more peaceful when I only could check the quotes once a day in the morning papers.