I suspect that "exclusive" refers to the use of the software; i.e. you may use this forever, but only for yourself/your company; i.e. you cannot give/sell this to anyone else; i.e. the consulting firm retains the right of selling the software to others themselves.
publically traded companies spiral into a crappy company fast. it's all about the shareholders and nothing about making a good product and sticking to what the company believes in.
The situation you describe is about short sightedness, such as your gut reaction to the concept of a company going public.
Badly run companies behave as you describe above. But the majority of companies that are listed on Wall/Bay Streets (eh?) for more than a few years are typically well run organizations. The fact that you are constantly bombarded by CNN with "failures" does not mean that the majority of public companies are failing. The economies in the north-western hemisphere are, believe it or not, strong and still growing.
Being one, I can say that shareholders of companies are not looking for the "quick buck". We want sustained long-term growth. The vast majority of investors do. Moving money around is expensive; jumping ships is risky. Intelligent investors want to find a strong pony and ride is it strong all the way around the track, not just get to the turn first.
Yes, there are examples of failed companies due to short sightedness. Yes you see a mob of screaming traders on the floor each day on CNN. But the vast majority of investment dollars is slow moving and methodically invested. Don't let the odd story that headlines for months on end blind you to the fact that there has only been ONE Enron; yes, there are a couple of other examples you likely can rhyme off, but the headlines don't showcase the bulk of the bell curves in the business world (or, for that matter, in any news category...)
If I've got code under Apache license and code under the GPLv3, I assume those can not be merged anyway because each body of code says derivatives must be under the same license.
Depends. If the copyright holder of one of those codes gives you permission to move their code under the other license (or if they do it themselves, say by you paying them to do so), then there is no problem.
If you are not a copyright holder or if the body of code you want to move over is the culmination of many copyright holders, then with both Apache and GPL there is no problem you merging the codes as long as it is for your own use.
You cannot merge the two codes and release the resultant as you have no right unless the way that you do it adheres to both licenses. Compatible licenses would allow you to merge code from two differently licensed projects without violating the terms of either.
I'd hate to see a law that would compel politically uneducated citizens to enter the voting both to vote on civil right limiting propositions.
Oh, I'm certainly not advocating that. But isn't it interesting that "fixing" the voting problem (be it directly through a law such as that or indirectly via improved education programs) is not in the best interest of the ruling party?
Your democracy is not in peril because a handful of individuals might have swayed/stolen a percent or two of votes. There is no way that they stole more than that because it would be way too detectable.
So in essence, your "democracy" is in peril because people are not voting. Don't put the blame on the election system. The fact is that you needed to "Get The Vote Out"...your democracy isn't being stolen, it is decaying.
it's their crappy network that is causing their delays!
Being a heavily-addicted user (and admin) myself, I have to say that the VAST majority of the time the RIM network is quite responsive. Often I'll send something to my work account from my gmail account and the browser screen just barely finishes refreshing from clicking "send" and my hip is vibrating from the new love.
Keeping people uninformed about a disaster doesn't help them.
The point that your parent poster (David?) has been making, and I think he's been quite articulate about it, is that there was no disaster to inform people about. The disaster didn't happen until later.
Do you think that an entire office building should be informed if the coffee shop in the lobby is robbed? It might not be another 2 hours before that burglar hits another business in the same building...if at all.
When I was in university, we had a professor murdered in one of our engineering buildings. I was a resident assistant at the other end of campus. I happened to learn about the incident via the grapevine (a friend in the campus police force dropped by while doing rounds when he got word). We knew the killer was out there, but we had absolutely no reason to think that such an incident would head our way. I did nothing out of the ordinary (normal rounds, check doors and windows, etc.) and likely wouldn't behave any differently today. If the school had shut down or there had been a lockdown in residence (which would likely be unenforceable anyways) I know we would have been raked over the coals for over reacting.
I'm not justifying the.ANI feature, but recognize that IE is far more than a simple "web browser". With features such as HTML Application, IE can be used for developing extremely rich enterprise applications...which is where most of the "bloat" comes in.
Yes, you mightn't need a full development environment inside of your word processor or web browser, but they didn't spend time and energy putting those features in there for nothing. Someone determined that the bloat would make them more money...based on their revenue stream, I'm going to say that they were right.
The topic is "Can Large Corporations BUY Cool", so I think it really is the point.
The subtitle though is If so, can they keep it cool, to which I believe the answer is "no". MySpace may not have become uncool yet (I don't know, not a user of it myself), but it is a simply matter of time before one division whose numbers are slumping decide that they need to leverage the corporate assets and you find the site awash in flash ads, can't-opt-out spam campains and other fantastic inventions of the 1950s brought to the 'net.
Perhaps the field of sales has changed since my day...
I can't speak for other types of sales, but in the field of (corporate) software sales re-licensing, upgrades and new projects with existing account makes up the vast majority of a sales persons quota. Many organizations will add an elements of "new licensing" to a sales quota, but that is often a very small portion of the overall.
Besides, who else does MS have to sell to? 85%+ is not just to you, but to him, her and every other IT organization on the planet. You would be very hard pressed to find organizations today that aren't running MS software on the majority of their desktops and at least a representative proportion of their servers (Google, Amazon, etc. exceptions noted). Heck, I wonder how the dumping of MS software is going at Novell, IBM and other MS "competitors"??
The sales site is not saying that Linux is evil or its advocates are ignorant (though it hints that there are such people...because there are). If you look at the majority of the "solutions" section, it points out MS's "strengths" in the areas that Linux typically dominates.
I agree with the point about asking "how its going". The site/tool does not try to create blind, rabid MS pushers. It is attempting to give sales people the arguments that "typical" people use for choosing Linux and the counter points those sales people can use to rebut. A website is not about to stop a moron from being a moron. It is information for those sales people to use; the good will use it wisely and effectively, the bad will continue to be morons.
Again, I'm not arguing that the points they give are fair or valid (some are, some are most definitely not). I'm simply pointing out the purpose of the website: an information tool for sales people who may not have an understanding of the various "Linux cultures" that exist. The tool uses broad strokes that a typical sales person can use as a guideline towards upselling/converting potential accounts.
And don't confuse the "85%". That may be 85% to the entire corporation, but to the given "Linux-using department" that the sales person is trying to penetrate they percentage may be much smaller (like 0%). Again, the tool helps a sales person to understand why the "Linux users" are using Linux and the discussion points that they can use to try to penetrate into that department (including a broad-stroke effort requirement).
On top of all of this, even if the given "Linux users" are already at 85%, there is still the need to at least discuss the other 15% to make sure that the arguments for the 15% are valid. There is the need to discuss what the 15% reason is to let the customer feel that their concerns are being heard. If a sales person ignored the 15% entirely (i.e. didn't ask "how it's going") then they risk having the arguments supporting the 15% bleed into the 85%.
Is every appliance in your kitchen from the same company
No, but neither are they 85% all from the same company; if they were we'd be comparing apples (sorry, no pun intended).
As the rest of my blurb said, 100% is all that MS has left to offer...they've already sold you on the 85%++. The sales guy has to sell you something, he can't say "well I sold you 85% of your software for the past 5 years, I'll simply resell you again this year". He has to make his numbers and quotas only go up.
Microsoft cannot do well by admitting that there is a viable alternative to their nearly homogeneous platform. No one is going to go off and buy more MS because MS admits that Linux (or whatever) would do better in some niche. Niches are all that MS has left to go after (other than starting up a whole new product line...see my previous comment on that).
Sales is just an established system of lying that shares certain commonalities regardless of what you're selling.
Though I agree that there is an element of "regardless of what you're selling" to sales (the job, after all, is to sell what their employer makes), I do not believe that Sales is "an established system of lying". Certainly there is a large proportion of the sales community that subscribes to that point of view, but the best and most successful become that way by selling a better refrigerator, not by selling junk.
Good sales people go to where the products are good because they tend to sell themselves. In reality, Microsoft software is a better sell than "Linux" because...well, when was the last time I saw a Linux ad in a mainstream magazine or on a television channel? MS has marketing and a focused sales pipeline (see TFA for an example), whereas much of the "Linux" sell vastly depends on legacy Unix converts or internal grass-roots projects taking off.
I've been at a startup now for 1 year. We've had 3 visits by MS resellers, 2 by a Dell server rep, 2 systems services reps (anti-vir/firewall/spam) all of whom are focused solely on the MS platform. To date, the number of Linux or Linux-related reps: zero.
he single biggest failure in the marketing message has been the "100% Microsoft" idea.
But that has to be the message. There is no other message that they can put out...they already have 80% or more of the OS-space in 90%+ companies. The only ways to appease their investors is to (a) increase the penetration of their #1 and #2 products and (b) enter into new markets. They are doing both, but (b) is never a sure thing and they've proven massively successful with (a).
The PinkPanther has what he thinks is helpful advice to force M$ shit onto people:
Just to clarify, he...er...I was simply pointing out the purpose and message of the website/sales tool. I was giving a bit of insight to the sales process for those/.'ers who may not hang out on that side of the lunch room. I was not, in any way, trying to advocate that anyone push one way or the other. My "note to sales" comments were simply highlighting what the website is saying.
When you sell something, it has to have real advantages.
No, no it does not. You obviously have never worked with people who focus exclusively on sales. Sales is about selling stuff, lots of it and quickly. Making stuff good, dependable, etc... is management and engineering's job. If they don't do their job effectively, Sales still has to do its job. Quality and "real advantages" are a nice-to-have for a Sales person, but are not a "has to have".
Not sure if "enemy" is the right word to describe a (hopefully) potential customer.
This site is a sales tool to help sales folks penetrate into different environments where Linux has some level of establishment. Based on a set of simplistic characteristics (how ingrained is Linux? how risk adverse is the customer? are they frothing-at-the-mouth OSS-kool-aid punch drunks?), the tool gives generalizations as to the type, size and length of each opportunity across 5 broad categories.
This type of tool is great for sales folks trying to get their heads around something they don't really understand. Right off certain approaches with broad strokes, and push the blue kool-aid instead.
Where a lot of this falls down is the reliance of already-proven sketchy evidence (Get The Facts, TCO studies, etc...), and some overly simplistic anecdotal evidence ("Customers are already switching from Apache/Linux to IIS6/Windows" ; "Customers are finding that development with ASP.NET is quicker and easier" ;...). The reason that the sales cycle is longer for some of the types is that either they are rabid OSS drones (medium-length cycle; note to sales folks - do a political end-run around the geek) or they actually have successful experience with the alternative platforms (longest cycle; note to sales folks - it is going to be a hard fight and a lot of the "sales tools" relied on for other profiles likely will fail here).
So you think that moving back to 1990s technology is a better step for Swing, since it can't solve the problem of getting a desktop application to automagically work on a cell phone?
Swing UI development is not difficult; in fact, if a developer wants to force components to be of fixed size and location they can do that straight up, out of the box (heck, they could turn to PowerJ if they're looking for 1990s GUI development for Java).
Are you truly trying to tell me that companies went belly-up because they could not build functional UI using Swing? You would have to point me to a whack of credible URLs before I'd buy that one. Don't get me wrong; I believe there are companies that have gone belly up, some of them developing apps with a Swing UI...but I'd want to hear about the company's business plan, sales/marketing strategy and software architecture roadmap prior to accepting that Swing failed them to disaster.
Netbeans and Eclipse should catch up in ease of use in GUI development circa 1990 any day now.
You mean that Java/Swing can get rid of the fantastic dynamic resizing capabilities and return to the days of fixed-size windows? Fantastic, to hell with the user changing monitor sizes, going to bigger fonts, etc...
A company should not consider $7000 over the span of 11.5 years as being "dramatically" expensive. Again, I suspect the cost to them of chasing down all of the required information to confirm that the patent is indeed dead-weight (including eliminating the possibility of risk from the competition) would be substatially more.
Besides, the marketing department would also have to take a blow, lowering the "registered patents" count on all of their brochures and boxes...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that "exclusive" refers to the use of the software; i.e. you may use this forever, but only for yourself/your company; i.e. you cannot give/sell this to anyone else; i.e. the consulting firm retains the right of selling the software to others themselves.
The situation you describe is about short sightedness, such as your gut reaction to the concept of a company going public.
Badly run companies behave as you describe above. But the majority of companies that are listed on Wall/Bay Streets (eh?) for more than a few years are typically well run organizations. The fact that you are constantly bombarded by CNN with "failures" does not mean that the majority of public companies are failing. The economies in the north-western hemisphere are, believe it or not, strong and still growing.
Being one, I can say that shareholders of companies are not looking for the "quick buck". We want sustained long-term growth. The vast majority of investors do. Moving money around is expensive; jumping ships is risky. Intelligent investors want to find a strong pony and ride is it strong all the way around the track, not just get to the turn first.
Yes, there are examples of failed companies due to short sightedness. Yes you see a mob of screaming traders on the floor each day on CNN. But the vast majority of investment dollars is slow moving and methodically invested. Don't let the odd story that headlines for months on end blind you to the fact that there has only been ONE Enron; yes, there are a couple of other examples you likely can rhyme off, but the headlines don't showcase the bulk of the bell curves in the business world (or, for that matter, in any news category...)
It also begs the question as to what they define "wireless" to mean, as SQL Anywhere was not mentioned at all.
Damn I love taking statements out of context...
Depends. If the copyright holder of one of those codes gives you permission to move their code under the other license (or if they do it themselves, say by you paying them to do so), then there is no problem.
If you are not a copyright holder or if the body of code you want to move over is the culmination of many copyright holders, then with both Apache and GPL there is no problem you merging the codes as long as it is for your own use.
You cannot merge the two codes and release the resultant as you have no right unless the way that you do it adheres to both licenses. Compatible licenses would allow you to merge code from two differently licensed projects without violating the terms of either.
Oh, I'm certainly not advocating that. But isn't it interesting that "fixing" the voting problem (be it directly through a law such as that or indirectly via improved education programs) is not in the best interest of the ruling party?
So in essence, your "democracy" is in peril because people are not voting. Don't put the blame on the election system. The fact is that you needed to "Get The Vote Out"...your democracy isn't being stolen, it is decaying.
Damn! We thought these were emails for whitehouse.com, eh?
Being a heavily-addicted user (and admin) myself, I have to say that the VAST majority of the time the RIM network is quite responsive. Often I'll send something to my work account from my gmail account and the browser screen just barely finishes refreshing from clicking "send" and my hip is vibrating from the new love.
Do you think that an entire office building should be informed if the coffee shop in the lobby is robbed? It might not be another 2 hours before that burglar hits another business in the same building...if at all.
When I was in university, we had a professor murdered in one of our engineering buildings. I was a resident assistant at the other end of campus. I happened to learn about the incident via the grapevine (a friend in the campus police force dropped by while doing rounds when he got word). We knew the killer was out there, but we had absolutely no reason to think that such an incident would head our way. I did nothing out of the ordinary (normal rounds, check doors and windows, etc.) and likely wouldn't behave any differently today. If the school had shut down or there had been a lockdown in residence (which would likely be unenforceable anyways) I know we would have been raked over the coals for over reacting.
Yeah! Right...Piccadilly...ROTFL...That anywhere near Marvin Gardens??
You've probably never even been to the eastern seaboard before, have you pal?
From your point of view, maybe. But, again, MS put in the features you aren't using because someone wanted to pay for them.
Yes, you mightn't need a full development environment inside of your word processor or web browser, but they didn't spend time and energy putting those features in there for nothing. Someone determined that the bloat would make them more money...based on their revenue stream, I'm going to say that they were right.
The subtitle though is If so, can they keep it cool, to which I believe the answer is "no". MySpace may not have become uncool yet (I don't know, not a user of it myself), but it is a simply matter of time before one division whose numbers are slumping decide that they need to leverage the corporate assets and you find the site awash in flash ads, can't-opt-out spam campains and other fantastic inventions of the 1950s brought to the 'net.
Those aren't errors.
I can't speak for other types of sales, but in the field of (corporate) software sales re-licensing, upgrades and new projects with existing account makes up the vast majority of a sales persons quota. Many organizations will add an elements of "new licensing" to a sales quota, but that is often a very small portion of the overall.
Besides, who else does MS have to sell to? 85%+ is not just to you, but to him, her and every other IT organization on the planet. You would be very hard pressed to find organizations today that aren't running MS software on the majority of their desktops and at least a representative proportion of their servers (Google, Amazon, etc. exceptions noted). Heck, I wonder how the dumping of MS software is going at Novell, IBM and other MS "competitors"??
The sales site is not saying that Linux is evil or its advocates are ignorant (though it hints that there are such people...because there are). If you look at the majority of the "solutions" section, it points out MS's "strengths" in the areas that Linux typically dominates.
I agree with the point about asking "how its going". The site/tool does not try to create blind, rabid MS pushers. It is attempting to give sales people the arguments that "typical" people use for choosing Linux and the counter points those sales people can use to rebut. A website is not about to stop a moron from being a moron. It is information for those sales people to use; the good will use it wisely and effectively, the bad will continue to be morons.
Again, I'm not arguing that the points they give are fair or valid (some are, some are most definitely not). I'm simply pointing out the purpose of the website: an information tool for sales people who may not have an understanding of the various "Linux cultures" that exist. The tool uses broad strokes that a typical sales person can use as a guideline towards upselling/converting potential accounts.
And don't confuse the "85%". That may be 85% to the entire corporation, but to the given "Linux-using department" that the sales person is trying to penetrate they percentage may be much smaller (like 0%). Again, the tool helps a sales person to understand why the "Linux users" are using Linux and the discussion points that they can use to try to penetrate into that department (including a broad-stroke effort requirement).
On top of all of this, even if the given "Linux users" are already at 85%, there is still the need to at least discuss the other 15% to make sure that the arguments for the 15% are valid. There is the need to discuss what the 15% reason is to let the customer feel that their concerns are being heard. If a sales person ignored the 15% entirely (i.e. didn't ask "how it's going") then they risk having the arguments supporting the 15% bleed into the 85%.
No, but neither are they 85% all from the same company; if they were we'd be comparing apples (sorry, no pun intended).
As the rest of my blurb said, 100% is all that MS has left to offer...they've already sold you on the 85%++. The sales guy has to sell you something, he can't say "well I sold you 85% of your software for the past 5 years, I'll simply resell you again this year". He has to make his numbers and quotas only go up.
Microsoft cannot do well by admitting that there is a viable alternative to their nearly homogeneous platform. No one is going to go off and buy more MS because MS admits that Linux (or whatever) would do better in some niche. Niches are all that MS has left to go after (other than starting up a whole new product line...see my previous comment on that).
Though I agree that there is an element of "regardless of what you're selling" to sales (the job, after all, is to sell what their employer makes), I do not believe that Sales is "an established system of lying". Certainly there is a large proportion of the sales community that subscribes to that point of view, but the best and most successful become that way by selling a better refrigerator, not by selling junk.
Good sales people go to where the products are good because they tend to sell themselves. In reality, Microsoft software is a better sell than "Linux" because...well, when was the last time I saw a Linux ad in a mainstream magazine or on a television channel? MS has marketing and a focused sales pipeline (see TFA for an example), whereas much of the "Linux" sell vastly depends on legacy Unix converts or internal grass-roots projects taking off.
I've been at a startup now for 1 year. We've had 3 visits by MS resellers, 2 by a Dell server rep, 2 systems services reps (anti-vir/firewall/spam) all of whom are focused solely on the MS platform. To date, the number of Linux or Linux-related reps: zero.
But that has to be the message. There is no other message that they can put out...they already have 80% or more of the OS-space in 90%+ companies. The only ways to appease their investors is to (a) increase the penetration of their #1 and #2 products and (b) enter into new markets. They are doing both, but (b) is never a sure thing and they've proven massively successful with (a).Just to clarify, he...er...I was simply pointing out the purpose and message of the website/sales tool. I was giving a bit of insight to the sales process for those /.'ers who may not hang out on that side of the lunch room. I was not, in any way, trying to advocate that anyone push one way or the other. My "note to sales" comments were simply highlighting what the website is saying.
No, no it does not. You obviously have never worked with people who focus exclusively on sales. Sales is about selling stuff, lots of it and quickly. Making stuff good, dependable, etc... is management and engineering's job. If they don't do their job effectively, Sales still has to do its job. Quality and "real advantages" are a nice-to-have for a Sales person, but are not a "has to have".Not sure if "enemy" is the right word to describe a (hopefully) potential customer.
This site is a sales tool to help sales folks penetrate into different environments where Linux has some level of establishment. Based on a set of simplistic characteristics (how ingrained is Linux? how risk adverse is the customer? are they frothing-at-the-mouth OSS-kool-aid punch drunks?), the tool gives generalizations as to the type, size and length of each opportunity across 5 broad categories.
This type of tool is great for sales folks trying to get their heads around something they don't really understand. Right off certain approaches with broad strokes, and push the blue kool-aid instead.
Where a lot of this falls down is the reliance of already-proven sketchy evidence (Get The Facts, TCO studies, etc...), and some overly simplistic anecdotal evidence ("Customers are already switching from Apache/Linux to IIS6/Windows" ; "Customers are finding that development with ASP.NET is quicker and easier" ; ...). The reason that the sales cycle is longer for some of the types is that either they are rabid OSS drones (medium-length cycle; note to sales folks - do a political end-run around the geek) or they actually have successful experience with the alternative platforms (longest cycle; note to sales folks - it is going to be a hard fight and a lot of the "sales tools" relied on for other profiles likely will fail here).
So you think that moving back to 1990s technology is a better step for Swing, since it can't solve the problem of getting a desktop application to automagically work on a cell phone?
Swing UI development is not difficult; in fact, if a developer wants to force components to be of fixed size and location they can do that straight up, out of the box (heck, they could turn to PowerJ if they're looking for 1990s GUI development for Java).
Are you truly trying to tell me that companies went belly-up because they could not build functional UI using Swing? You would have to point me to a whack of credible URLs before I'd buy that one. Don't get me wrong; I believe there are companies that have gone belly up, some of them developing apps with a Swing UI...but I'd want to hear about the company's business plan, sales/marketing strategy and software architecture roadmap prior to accepting that Swing failed them to disaster.
You mean that Java/Swing can get rid of the fantastic dynamic resizing capabilities and return to the days of fixed-size windows? Fantastic, to hell with the user changing monitor sizes, going to bigger fonts, etc...
A company should not consider $7000 over the span of 11.5 years as being "dramatically" expensive. Again, I suspect the cost to them of chasing down all of the required information to confirm that the patent is indeed dead-weight (including eliminating the possibility of risk from the competition) would be substatially more.
Besides, the marketing department would also have to take a blow, lowering the "registered patents" count on all of their brochures and boxes... :-)