Interesting write up -- of course Apple had a relativley robust OS that would only crash three or four times a day and would eat itself regularly.
DOS was ugly. It worked and was reliable. It was even much faster than the MAC dreamed of being.
Bill G. didn't write it. He bought it. He grew it from what it started from to the #1 OS in the world for a long time.
Of course, Steve didn't think up the idea behind the original MAC GUI on his own either. He borrowed it from Xerox (note: borrowed it, not illegal but also not licensed, purchased or in any other way paying homage to the creators).
By that same justification Word Perfect was a good buy after Novel picked it up. It didn't matter that Novel had no clue what they had bought -- how much money they threw away doing it -- or how they were going to make any moeny with it. It was a short term affair -- the assett depreciated rapidly and was sold to Corel for a pittance.
Of course the real question is -- does it have the functions you need! If it does it will work for me -- so I will check it out if it is free but I won't risk the 79 on it today....
In the grand scheme of corporate computing the cost of the software is a small amount to pay for the functionality it buys (generic office software included, server software included and even vertical market applications included -- they may be expensive but they are cost justified).
Unfortuantely it reminds me of too many optional systems that have been floated and failed. How about content rating for web sites? It's not used because nothing is rated.
Code signing? Used infrequently at best -- and a lot of the best software doesn't use it because the coders are spending their time coding.
If you don't rate a large group of software (open source/shareware/etc.) of what use is the rating system? It will be widely ignored within 6 months of implementation. This approach has a very week carrot (good rating should mean a sign of quality of the software) and no stick (a bad rating will not mean that the software has flaws, rather the majority of the badly rated apps were just never rated -- thus weakening the carrot).
By the same logic Apple killed Be. After all they wouldn't let Be run on their hardware -- wouldn't pre-package Be and sell it...
Be was at best a niche OS with no marketing plan, few applications and no niche to mine. It had some points that were very superior to any of the competition of the day but failed due to the lack of a business model.
Would open source software be unrated? Who would bare the cost of rating open source software? Would the distributor of an open source application be the responsible party? Define distributor while we are at it -- Red Hat? Source Forge? Download.com? The implications are potentially enormouse.
If you raise the cost of entry to a market you are protecting the current players -- i.e.: invoking a rating system, passing a liability law, etc. will help to make sure that the same players are in power for years to come. We've seen the comparison several times on this thread -- the car manufacturers were made liable under the lemon laws. How many car makers suffered because of it? How many changed their business practices drastically? Didn't the presence of the law force any potential new players to pass a higher bar to play in the field? Legislation is one sure way to reduce competition.
With law you must be very, very careful what you ask for -- you may get it and have to live with unanticipated consequences. The established players will go over any new law with a fine toothed comb to lobby for or against it. They will also spend money on ensuring compliance. Law's tend to drive up complexity in the business world -- again raising the bar for entrance.
Perhaps it should be amended to say in it's curren version -- not the 4 to 7 year old models.
Linux, in 1995/98, was not the product it is today. The comparison needs to be what it is today.
Incidentally, until Linux can say the product we have today (Linux = community) is better than the product MS has today -- which means the shipping product in a RELEASE (a hard concept for open source people to understand, I know) -- Linux has little to talk about in the commercial sector.
Linux shows promise. Great promise. So did Be. Atari at one point had promise. The Amiga was a great machine. Xerox had hordes of software written and in development. GEOS was superior to Windows in many ways. None of these was open source but some were very cheap/inexpensive for what you got. Each of them failed miserably. Each of them failed to find themselves. MS didn't kill any of them. They committed product suicide.
I hope Linux doesn't -- it has broad support in many areas but it could still committ suicide. I'm still waiting for the first open source exploit to hit critical mass and have consumers stop and think (do you really, for a single second, believe that John Q. Consumer will not log in as root -- and when he does and his system is damaged to you believe that he will view himself as liable for that damage?).
Or perhaps that means we need to evaluate the source for SAMBA and kick out major pieces as copyright infringement if it is identical to the MS source -- which came first? Who stole from whom?
That's not a battle you want to be in with a company that has many billions of cash in the bank and a full time legal staff.
Wait a minute, you said MSCE's which means $120 an hour or so, not Linux geek/burger flipper @ 5.35 per hour.
The valid point still remains -- how much is the labor for both building and support.
Even if the build time is 1 hour per box and with only 60 boxes it probably will be at least that not to mention another hour per box in planning -- the support costs over the next three years will likely cost you more than the differences between the original 1k and 600+labor + support + support labor.
Bring in the Union and see me find another career.
Sure I want some stability, good pay ang good benefits (which I have...). The reason I don't work in a union shop is I don't want the bull, I don't want the clearly defined line between management and labor where someone else negotiates for me.
Unions are good for the 30% of programmers (if that) who are mediocre and the 30% who are leeches. To the other 30% that excel they are the kiss of death -- they would suck most of the fun out of the job to begin with.
Ditch digging would be funner. Schlepping burgers may be funner.
Are you naive to assume that Apple and Sun are more ethical than MS? Next you'll be telling me that IBM is your friend... that Larry Ellison isn't an egomaniac willing to do whatever it takes to make a sale and that the business of business is to support employees (it's not -- it's to make a buck for the shareholders and if the employees get supported in the effort that's ok too).
Sounds like a good buy for a company with lot's of cash.
Who's in the market for a large share of the cable and telecom infrastructure and has a few billion hanging around in cash? What's this -- front page of most recent Money magazine -- MS is sitting on 40+billion in cash and looking for investments...
But DO NOT force anyone to use a download accelerator. For those of us blessed with broadband a large download easily gotten is worth 10 times as much as a medium download clowded by well meaning accelerator usage.
Make it easy to download your product. Make it easy to use your product. Before it times out we'll have a PO out to you for a dozen copies.
Call me? Hopefully not! Can I e-mail you if we have issues?
Actually -- they used the same AOL client for e-mail.
It was a bad, bad, bad technology move. Unfortunately they responded the wrong way to the problem from a technology perspective. The better companies use their own product (eat their own dog food) and when it does not meet their need retrench and make it meet their need.
For better or worse -- MS does it, so does IBM and most Linux companies to a large extent. If you can learn from your own errors your that much better off.
Microsoft out-marketed IBM... No one can say with a straight face that at the time OS/2 was released that it was locked out of the market by MS.
Was it locked out of the market by IBM? As usual MS's competition couldn't market themselves out of a wet paper bag.
How does this apply to Linux today? Have we learned anything? Are the Linux companies winning due to not only technical merit but also marketing prowess?
So, will they do just what they did with big tobacco? Implement a government settlement whereby MS will be required to raise the price of their product over the next few years to pay off the settlement while never calling it a "tax"?
If anything the tobacco cases show that the government would be better suited to tax using a tax and not a settlement.
Umm... actually since they own 95% of the desktop market and a large share of the server market (small to mid-range especially) I don't think anyone could argue that MS is a has been with a straight face.
Since they are also a moving target in the software category -- i.e.: they are always modifying their products, dare I say improving them and enhancing them -- I don't think anyone who wants to survive in the software industry could afford to discount them today.
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh --- that explains it... Linux users don't use cable modems!
Real programmers ship. (quote from un-remembered source)
Of course then the password would have been passed in clear text format open to any sniffer out there....
Interesting write up -- of course Apple had a relativley robust OS that would only crash three or four times a day and would eat itself regularly.
DOS was ugly. It worked and was reliable. It was even much faster than the MAC dreamed of being.
Bill G. didn't write it. He bought it. He grew it from what it started from to the #1 OS in the world for a long time.
Of course, Steve didn't think up the idea behind the original MAC GUI on his own either. He borrowed it from Xerox (note: borrowed it, not illegal but also not licensed, purchased or in any other way paying homage to the creators).
Unions have the side effect of leveling the playing field. Great for the slackers, not good at all for the achievers.
By that same justification Word Perfect was a good buy after Novel picked it up. It didn't matter that Novel had no clue what they had bought -- how much money they threw away doing it -- or how they were going to make any moeny with it. It was a short term affair -- the assett depreciated rapidly and was sold to Corel for a pittance.
How does Sun differ from Novel in this case?
1/4 the price for 1/10th the functionality.
Of course the real question is -- does it have the functions you need! If it does it will work for me -- so I will check it out if it is free but I won't risk the 79 on it today....
In the grand scheme of corporate computing the cost of the software is a small amount to pay for the functionality it buys (generic office software included, server software included and even vertical market applications included -- they may be expensive but they are cost justified).
Unfortuantely it reminds me of too many optional systems that have been floated and failed. How about content rating for web sites? It's not used because nothing is rated.
Code signing? Used infrequently at best -- and a lot of the best software doesn't use it because the coders are spending their time coding.
If you don't rate a large group of software (open source/shareware/etc.) of what use is the rating system? It will be widely ignored within 6 months of implementation. This approach has a very week carrot (good rating should mean a sign of quality of the software) and no stick (a bad rating will not mean that the software has flaws, rather the majority of the badly rated apps were just never rated -- thus weakening the carrot).
By the same logic Apple killed Be. After all they wouldn't let Be run on their hardware -- wouldn't pre-package Be and sell it...
Be was at best a niche OS with no marketing plan, few applications and no niche to mine. It had some points that were very superior to any of the competition of the day but failed due to the lack of a business model.
Would open source software be unrated? Who would bare the cost of rating open source software? Would the distributor of an open source application be the responsible party? Define distributor while we are at it -- Red Hat? Source Forge? Download.com? The implications are potentially enormouse.
If you raise the cost of entry to a market you are protecting the current players -- i.e.: invoking a rating system, passing a liability law, etc. will help to make sure that the same players are in power for years to come. We've seen the comparison several times on this thread -- the car manufacturers were made liable under the lemon laws. How many car makers suffered because of it? How many changed their business practices drastically? Didn't the presence of the law force any potential new players to pass a higher bar to play in the field? Legislation is one sure way to reduce competition.
With law you must be very, very careful what you ask for -- you may get it and have to live with unanticipated consequences. The established players will go over any new law with a fine toothed comb to lobby for or against it. They will also spend money on ensuring compliance. Law's tend to drive up complexity in the business world -- again raising the bar for entrance.
Perhaps it should be amended to say in it's curren version -- not the 4 to 7 year old models.
Linux, in 1995/98, was not the product it is today. The comparison needs to be what it is today.
Incidentally, until Linux can say the product we have today (Linux = community) is better than the product MS has today -- which means the shipping product in a RELEASE (a hard concept for open source people to understand, I know) -- Linux has little to talk about in the commercial sector.
Linux shows promise. Great promise. So did Be. Atari at one point had promise. The Amiga was a great machine. Xerox had hordes of software written and in development. GEOS was superior to Windows in many ways. None of these was open source but some were very cheap/inexpensive for what you got. Each of them failed miserably. Each of them failed to find themselves. MS didn't kill any of them. They committed product suicide.
I hope Linux doesn't -- it has broad support in many areas but it could still committ suicide. I'm still waiting for the first open source exploit to hit critical mass and have consumers stop and think (do you really, for a single second, believe that John Q. Consumer will not log in as root -- and when he does and his system is damaged to you believe that he will view himself as liable for that damage?).
Or perhaps that means we need to evaluate the source for SAMBA and kick out major pieces as copyright infringement if it is identical to the MS source -- which came first? Who stole from whom?
That's not a battle you want to be in with a company that has many billions of cash in the bank and a full time legal staff.
Wait a minute, you said MSCE's which means $120 an hour or so, not Linux geek/burger flipper @ 5.35 per hour.
The valid point still remains -- how much is the labor for both building and support.
Even if the build time is 1 hour per box and with only 60 boxes it probably will be at least that not to mention another hour per box in planning -- the support costs over the next three years will likely cost you more than the differences between the original 1k and 600+labor + support + support labor.
Bring in the Union and see me find another career.
Sure I want some stability, good pay ang good benefits (which I have...). The reason I don't work in a union shop is I don't want the bull, I don't want the clearly defined line between management and labor where someone else negotiates for me.
Unions are good for the 30% of programmers (if that) who are mediocre and the 30% who are leeches. To the other 30% that excel they are the kiss of death -- they would suck most of the fun out of the job to begin with.
Ditch digging would be funner. Schlepping burgers may be funner.
Are you naive to assume that Apple and Sun are more ethical than MS? Next you'll be telling me that IBM is your friend... that Larry Ellison isn't an egomaniac willing to do whatever it takes to make a sale and that the business of business is to support employees (it's not -- it's to make a buck for the shareholders and if the employees get supported in the effort that's ok too).
Sounds like a good buy for a company with lot's of cash.
Who's in the market for a large share of the cable and telecom infrastructure and has a few billion hanging around in cash? What's this -- front page of most recent Money magazine -- MS is sitting on 40+billion in cash and looking for investments...
But DO NOT force anyone to use a download accelerator. For those of us blessed with broadband a large download easily gotten is worth 10 times as much as a medium download clowded by well meaning accelerator usage.
Make it easy to download your product. Make it easy to use your product. Before it times out we'll have a PO out to you for a dozen copies.
Call me? Hopefully not! Can I e-mail you if we have issues?
and use the dark side to your advantage.
Any sys ad worth his pay can configure roaming profiles. Any W2K geek can configure TS for remote administration. Use the force -- it is part of you.
responding is wrong.
Actually -- they used the same AOL client for e-mail.
It was a bad, bad, bad technology move. Unfortunately they responded the wrong way to the problem from a technology perspective. The better companies use their own product (eat their own dog food) and when it does not meet their need retrench and make it meet their need.
For better or worse -- MS does it, so does IBM and most Linux companies to a large extent. If you can learn from your own errors your that much better off.
If you read the article...
If you were using POP services...
Then you would know that this doesn't affect you. All of my e-mail on Yahoo has been delivered to me by POP in folders or not.
They are NOT charging for web mail users. If you use their folders you are a web mail user.
Umm... actually our vendors recommend that we reboot our production heavy use AIX systems once a month -- not to mention cycling Sybase every week.
Microsoft out-marketed IBM... No one can say with a straight face that at the time OS/2 was released that it was locked out of the market by MS.
Was it locked out of the market by IBM? As usual MS's competition couldn't market themselves out of a wet paper bag.
How does this apply to Linux today? Have we learned anything? Are the Linux companies winning due to not only technical merit but also marketing prowess?
No.
Linux isn't it?
I.e.: an OS that is great as a server but has a rudimentary UI at best and a horrendous one at worst.
So, will they do just what they did with big tobacco? Implement a government settlement whereby MS will be required to raise the price of their product over the next few years to pay off the settlement while never calling it a "tax"?
If anything the tobacco cases show that the government would be better suited to tax using a tax and not a settlement.
Umm... actually since they own 95% of the desktop market and a large share of the server market (small to mid-range especially) I don't think anyone could argue that MS is a has been with a straight face.
Since they are also a moving target in the software category -- i.e.: they are always modifying their products, dare I say improving them and enhancing them -- I don't think anyone who wants to survive in the software industry could afford to discount them today.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.