I don't think Linux is un-brandable, un-sellable. The real reason that Linux (or sadly OS X) will never beat Windows lies in the reality that the best technology doesn't always win.
Linux (and to a much lesser extent, the Macintosh) are populist movements which have produced deliverables which are at worst on par with and at best far exceeding the quality of Microsoft's products. The problem is that Microsoft a) doesn't need to rely on populism since it has a monopoly, b) doesn't need to innovate because it has a stranglehold on the market and c) doesn't have to worry about looking over its shoulder for competitors because it knows that the vast majority of computer users just don't care.
That is the thing that really sticks in all of our craws, since we all care so deeply about our destkop environments, our platforms, our shells and the like. But Joe Blow doesn't giving a flying flounder about open standards or browser vulnerabilities or even clunky GUI metaphors. They're used to it, it (generally) does what they want it to. They have no reason to change.
There's always going to be a (thankfully growing) minority of users who are heavily invested in using OS's and environments that are more well-rounded, more secure, more stable than Windows, and thank heavens for that. But the truth is that the "who's going to beat Windows" ship sailed a long time ago, and the geek community would be much better-served to accept that and move on. It doesn't mean that innovation in the OS space needs to die, but it does mean that we need to be realistic about why we want to innovate. Because if we're in it to change the world and take Windows out of the equation, we're setting ourselves up for bitter failure.
Ana Marie Cox over at Wonkette has mastered the art of the political blog. Like all of the other Nick Denton nano-publishing subsidiaries, what makes Wonkette so great is that it treats its subject with a sort of bemused, drawl curiosity, much like a gaggle of upper-classmen watching freshmen arrive for their first day of high school. Cox's humor is so biting, so snarky that literally nobody is outside its pale, which is refreshing these days. However, unlike most bloggers who merely opine on the news, she's cultivated a true insider persona : people from all political quarters of the political scene treat her as one of them. And why not? She's smart, savvy, will turn on any one of them for a scoop and has expressed an interest in buggery: if that doesn't scream one of them, I don't know what does.
Besides, she broke the whole Washingtonienne scandal: that alone makes her aces in my book!
Consider what's important to you here: is it that your company's infrastructure change to Linux or that it change to your preferred brand of Linux. Then consider the alternative, meaning what would happen if the roll-out failed? You'll be supporting AIX until your 90, kid, am I right? I'd say let your company switch to Linux in the manner which gives them the greatest possible chance for success. Once they're Linux addicts, then foist your favorite distro on them!
I see this as a pity play by M$, wanting users to just chill about bugs because they're so damned hard to fix. Well, excuse me, but last time I checked Microsoft wasn't giving Office software away for free, and if someone is going to shell out beaucoup bucks for something they have a right to demand it works as advertised.
Cry me a river, Microsoft. I'll save my pity and empathy for people who do community or open source development.
The cynical side of me (at war with the large part of me which really wants to believe this memo to be legitimate) tends to think the spelling and grammatical mistakes were intentional on the part of the forger. After all, he/she might think others would believe, who'd go through the effort of creating forgery and then forget to run a spellcheck?
You are aware of who you're addressing here, right? We're talking about people who will make their parents call a vendor Help Desk because they cannot "stoop" to helping them solve simple issues with Windows. We're talking about people who literally could get in fist-fights over which BSD-derivative is superior. We're talking about people who think a red fedora is a cool logo. Of course it's a religion, to some at least.
This sort of idiotic logic is analogous to someone saying "It's always raining, so skateboarding sucks." The two have no connection with one another, other than pure coincidence.
And I speak from experience, as I've recently swapped in my third crappy Intel-based motherboard on my RedHat box at home.
Micro$oft never changes their mind, never yields to public outcry, no matter how outrageously far they might have overstepped any particular line. In fact, as a company they've always sort of delighted in the fact that they didn't have to make decisions based on practicality and expediency: they've always wanted to world (read, competitors) to understand that they will do what they want, when they want and to whom they wish to do it.
So, I think it's a pretty big thing when the Redmonster backs down, even over something this silly (and arguably, that they had no claim to in the first place). No, this is not like them apologizing to Apple for stealing-and-ruining their OS (or, to be fair, like Apple doing the same to Xerox-PARC) or changing their mind on just how hard it actually would be to de-couple the browser from the OS, but I think it's an indication of a subtle cultural shift. Maybe it was Ballmer's off-day?
In addition, I commend young Mr. Rowe for taking as much out of them as they'd give, even if their motives were PR-driven rather than a sincere wish to right a wrong. Besides, the more experience he gains with ASP/.NET, the more he'll realize he was smart to be heading in the direction of PHP to begin with. *snicker*
>> "This camera...competes with none of mine for image quality.
Well no shit, sherlock! It's a $10.99 camera, for chrissakes. But riddle-me-this, Batman: does it compete with any of yours on price? To say this camera isn't for geeks solely based on it's image quality totally disregards what the geek ethos (and much of/.!) is about: it's for geeks because it's hackable you pompous idiot!
Umm, I had the idea to come out with Perl 6. I wish Slashdot had thought it was worth posting at the time. Same with my ideas for cold fusion (no, not ColdFusion -- my roommate invented that!), the PDA and the sweater-vest.
Micro$oft didn't "drop the ball." It popped the ball.
Face it, Ballmer and Gates never had any intention of actually going to an open spec with their office documents: they have too much to lose. They simply wanted to gain some goodwill from the tech community, so they feigned an interest in that direction.
Sorry, but without Redmond on board and willing to hand over the keys to the store, this idea's another interesting-but-fruitless venture, doomed to fail (or, in this case, doomed to be adopted by such a small percentile of users as to render it useless).
Yet again, people are really spending energy wringing their hands over just how we can have a Linux desktop overtake Windows and thus solve the world's problems and blah blah blah...
What a total waste of time and energy. That ship has sailed. Linux-heads should use whatever GUI or shell they want, but focus on creating the GUI for the next killer app. Micro$soft already has established itself as the (albeit majorly flawed and utterly ugly) standard in this arena. Again, I sound like a broken record here, but Gates and Ballmer are not worried about Linux (or anyone else) chipping into their desktop dominance (server and enterpise dominance is, obviously, a whole other story). Instead, they are spending time R&D'ing (or, more likely, deciding on what other companies' technologies they are going to cherry pick and prey upon for themselves) the future of the computer or the 'net or what have you. Yup, they will do a shitty job. But if they're spending their energy on tomorrow and we're spending our energy on yesterday, who do you think is going to "win", exactly?
1) Your statement assumes - perhaps erroneously - that thick black cock annoys us. It's a big world, fella: it takes all kinds.
2) Warezed? Heck naw. If, indeed, Linus did kife the code (heh!), he and the Linux community are not being secretive or shady about their distribution of it.
3) Isn't the biggest annoyance in Linux hate-spam from SCO?
My big lesson in all this is that you can only do what you can do. Put another way, unless you're really passionate about the goals and ideals of your client/customer, don't sweat it if they want to do things in the silliest way possible. Your duty as a programmer/consultant/wonk is to point out where things might go astray and recommend going the other direction. But if The International House of Monoliths really wants to make stupid choices, hop in the boat and go down with the crew. Do not lose sleep over it.
Of course, in academic or more-idealistic environments, you should feel free to die on every hill if you wish.
Life's too short, friends. Think I'm gonna lose sleep because my latest client has chosen to ignore just about every Java best practice under the sun (under the Sun, even)? A resounding "heck no", I tell you! Think my managers will lose sleep when the time comes to fire my ass because the whole app has turned into the programming equivalent of Viet Nam? Lemme have a "heck no" from the crowd! I say, let 'em lay in their hastily-made and uncomfortable beds. Yes, it's demoralizing, but it's better to me than fighting with your customers/clients only to lose in the end.
>> Of the "requirments" you are given, concentrate on the one's that will actually solve the customer's problem. The rest are political/cosmetic. Do you want a beautiful failre, or an ugly success?
In case you haven't noticed, all-too-often a project's success or viability is tied in large part directly to those aforementioned "political/cosmetic" requir[e]ments. I'm just saying, if you're going to be all you-took-the-red-pill-so-deal-with-the-real-world- Ace, then the real world is like this: customers/clients couldn't give a flying fudgecicle how well code work - they want it to look pretty and Cover Their Assess politically. Above that, if it actually has functionality, that's gravy.
Yeah, that's a cynical, under-informed blanket statement, but it's not too far off the mark. "Requirements" as a rule have much less to do with business rules and much more to do with animated GIF's, unfortunately.
One of the (myriad) problems with Windows is that by integrating everything - by trying to do everything - it actually winds up not doing any one thing very well.
Linux is an outstanding OS - particularly as a server environment. That's where the bucks are in sales and service anyway: why compete with OS X? I use both Linux and OS X every day, and I wouldn't dare try to combine them/integrate them. They're each brilliant at what I need them for, but they'd be wholly inadequate if their roles were reversed somehow.
OS X will never be Linux, but if people spend time trying to make Linux behave like Jaguar/Panther/whatever, doesn't that undermine Linux as a whole?
Michael Bolton.
Yes, that's right. The bad-ass, perpetually angry programmer from the classic "Office Space" is the prototype of what a software developer should be portrayed as in a movie. And since his brilliant scheme is thwarted by a bug, all the better!
I am a Java developer and would love nothing more, but luckily my fantasies are much more attainable: like sleeping with Jenny McCarthy or learning to read minds.
If you're betting on Java to replace the desktop, I will take that bet any day of the week: I like those odds.
If, however, you're looking to the Java community to create the next killer app, redefine personal computing, etc, that could happen.
No no no! There is no UNLESS. There is just NO, it won't win. I know this sucks to admit. Listen, I'm a Mac person: I'm well acquainted with the bitter taste of having a 3rd-rate, bug-ridden piece of bloatware being a standard. But move past it.
Let me tell you, Bill Gates is SO beyond thinking about the desktop. It's the advantage of having oodles of cash, you see, but he's already targeting emerging markets (tablets, wireless, etc).
The battle, she is over. And it wasn't even much of a fight. And if the tech community stays mired in the "we're better, how come they won't notice that?" conversation, M$ will run right past us all and own the next big thing.
Stop trying to re-do what Microsoft has already undone. Think of what else is out there to do, change the whole paradim, not the perception.
Look, to some extent you're right: the grunts at any company grow bitter with how the muck-mucks in the Mercedes' (Mercedi?) market their blood sweat and tears. Anyone here ever had a meeting with a Marketing VP in which your eyes didn't roll at least once? 'Nuff said.
But I think this is unique to software development companies. Do the people working the 3rd shift line at the GM parts plant care as much about how the next Taurus is marketed as we do about the next version of our own company's software? Nope. I'm curious as to why this is, although I suspect that it's got something to do with there being an artistic component to programming that isn't necessarily (notice I didn't say "never") there for the auto parts manufacturer.
So, the problem is that if you create art for a corporation, they will use it and sell it, and you might not like how/why they do it. Moreover, the corporation is likely to seize on what type of your art sells well and market that into oblivion, letting the rest of your art get shelved.
Let's say you're an artist for an art factory and you start out doing Cube-ist stuff, and then you start to get into Avant Garde stuff, and your boss at the art factory says "Hey, screw that: more people shaped like shoe-boxes, you!" That's what we've got here. Microsoft's programmers are in some ways victims of their predecessor's success.
You realize, Nostradamus, that at the current rate that Linux is chipping away at Microsoft, your predictions will come true...in roughly the year 2050. At which time, are you telling me Linux is still going to be the major player? I doubt even Linus would make that guess. The market is flooded with Windows boxes and we're in a recession. Think people are eager to switch to something else, even if its free? That means buying books, buying manuals, buying friends who know this stuff dinner.
The "war" such as it is has been lost, for a long time. Evolution is the only thing that's gonna stop M$, and it will. But if you're waiting for the giant Asteroid to wipe them off them map, good luck. Look at how long cockroaches have survived.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think Linux is un-brandable, un-sellable. The real reason that Linux (or sadly OS X) will never beat Windows lies in the reality that the best technology doesn't always win.
Linux (and to a much lesser extent, the Macintosh) are populist movements which have produced deliverables which are at worst on par with and at best far exceeding the quality of Microsoft's products. The problem is that Microsoft a) doesn't need to rely on populism since it has a monopoly, b) doesn't need to innovate because it has a stranglehold on the market and c) doesn't have to worry about looking over its shoulder for competitors because it knows that the vast majority of computer users just don't care.
That is the thing that really sticks in all of our craws, since we all care so deeply about our destkop environments, our platforms, our shells and the like. But Joe Blow doesn't giving a flying flounder about open standards or browser vulnerabilities or even clunky GUI metaphors. They're used to it, it (generally) does what they want it to. They have no reason to change.
There's always going to be a (thankfully growing) minority of users who are heavily invested in using OS's and environments that are more well-rounded, more secure, more stable than Windows, and thank heavens for that. But the truth is that the "who's going to beat Windows" ship sailed a long time ago, and the geek community would be much better-served to accept that and move on. It doesn't mean that innovation in the OS space needs to die, but it does mean that we need to be realistic about why we want to innovate. Because if we're in it to change the world and take Windows out of the equation, we're setting ourselves up for bitter failure.
Ana Marie Cox over at Wonkette has mastered the art of the political blog. Like all of the other Nick Denton nano-publishing subsidiaries, what makes Wonkette so great is that it treats its subject with a sort of bemused, drawl curiosity, much like a gaggle of upper-classmen watching freshmen arrive for their first day of high school. Cox's humor is so biting, so snarky that literally nobody is outside its pale, which is refreshing these days. However, unlike most bloggers who merely opine on the news, she's cultivated a true insider persona : people from all political quarters of the political scene treat her as one of them. And why not? She's smart, savvy, will turn on any one of them for a scoop and has expressed an interest in buggery: if that doesn't scream one of them, I don't know what does.
Besides, she broke the whole Washingtonienne scandal: that alone makes her aces in my book!
Consider what's important to you here: is it that your company's infrastructure change to Linux or that it change to your preferred brand of Linux. Then consider the alternative, meaning what would happen if the roll-out failed? You'll be supporting AIX until your 90, kid, am I right? I'd say let your company switch to Linux in the manner which gives them the greatest possible chance for success. Once they're Linux addicts, then foist your favorite distro on them!
I see this as a pity play by M$, wanting users to just chill about bugs because they're so damned hard to fix. Well, excuse me, but last time I checked Microsoft wasn't giving Office software away for free, and if someone is going to shell out beaucoup bucks for something they have a right to demand it works as advertised.
Cry me a river, Microsoft. I'll save my pity and empathy for people who do community or open source development.
The cynical side of me (at war with the large part of me which really wants to believe this memo to be legitimate) tends to think the spelling and grammatical mistakes were intentional on the part of the forger. After all, he/she might think others would believe, who'd go through the effort of creating forgery and then forget to run a spellcheck?
And here I thought Microsoft Sans Serif was making inroads....
Operating systems aren't a religion.
You are aware of who you're addressing here, right? We're talking about people who will make their parents call a vendor Help Desk because they cannot "stoop" to helping them solve simple issues with Windows. We're talking about people who literally could get in fist-fights over which BSD-derivative is superior. We're talking about people who think a red fedora is a cool logo. Of course it's a religion, to some at least.
This sort of idiotic logic is analogous to someone saying "It's always raining, so skateboarding sucks." The two have no connection with one another, other than pure coincidence.
And I speak from experience, as I've recently swapped in my third crappy Intel-based motherboard on my RedHat box at home.
Stuff breaks and costs money: boo freaking hoo.
In closing: fuck you M$ and the horse you road in on.
/.
"You keep using that word -- I do not think it means what you think it means."
In closing, try to do spelling/grammatical checks if you're going to bold enough to drop an F-bomb on
Micro$oft never changes their mind, never yields to public outcry, no matter how outrageously far they might have overstepped any particular line. In fact, as a company they've always sort of delighted in the fact that they didn't have to make decisions based on practicality and expediency: they've always wanted to world (read, competitors) to understand that they will do what they want, when they want and to whom they wish to do it.
So, I think it's a pretty big thing when the Redmonster backs down, even over something this silly (and arguably, that they had no claim to in the first place). No, this is not like them apologizing to Apple for stealing-and-ruining their OS (or, to be fair, like Apple doing the same to Xerox-PARC) or changing their mind on just how hard it actually would be to de-couple the browser from the OS, but I think it's an indication of a subtle cultural shift. Maybe it was Ballmer's off-day?
In addition, I commend young Mr. Rowe for taking as much out of them as they'd give, even if their motives were PR-driven rather than a sincere wish to right a wrong. Besides, the more experience he gains with ASP/.NET, the more he'll realize he was smart to be heading in the direction of PHP to begin with. *snicker*
>> "This camera...competes with none of mine for image quality.
/.!) is about: it's for geeks because it's hackable you pompous idiot!
Well no shit, sherlock! It's a $10.99 camera, for chrissakes. But riddle-me-this, Batman: does it compete with any of yours on price? To say this camera isn't for geeks solely based on it's image quality totally disregards what the geek ethos (and much of
Umm, I had the idea to come out with Perl 6. I wish Slashdot had thought it was worth posting at the time. Same with my ideas for cold fusion (no, not ColdFusion -- my roommate invented that!), the PDA and the sweater-vest.
Micro$oft didn't "drop the ball." It popped the ball.
Face it, Ballmer and Gates never had any intention of actually going to an open spec with their office documents: they have too much to lose. They simply wanted to gain some goodwill from the tech community, so they feigned an interest in that direction.
Sorry, but without Redmond on board and willing to hand over the keys to the store, this idea's another interesting-but-fruitless venture, doomed to fail (or, in this case, doomed to be adopted by such a small percentile of users as to render it useless).
Yet again, people are really spending energy wringing their hands over just how we can have a Linux desktop overtake Windows and thus solve the world's problems and blah blah blah...
What a total waste of time and energy. That ship has sailed. Linux-heads should use whatever GUI or shell they want, but focus on creating the GUI for the next killer app. Micro$soft already has established itself as the (albeit majorly flawed and utterly ugly) standard in this arena. Again, I sound like a broken record here, but Gates and Ballmer are not worried about Linux (or anyone else) chipping into their desktop dominance (server and enterpise dominance is, obviously, a whole other story). Instead, they are spending time R&D'ing (or, more likely, deciding on what other companies' technologies they are going to cherry pick and prey upon for themselves) the future of the computer or the 'net or what have you. Yup, they will do a shitty job. But if they're spending their energy on tomorrow and we're spending our energy on yesterday, who do you think is going to "win", exactly?
A few thoughts:
1) Your statement assumes - perhaps erroneously - that thick black cock annoys us. It's a big world, fella: it takes all kinds.
2) Warezed? Heck naw. If, indeed, Linus did kife the code (heh!), he and the Linux community are not being secretive or shady about their distribution of it.
3) Isn't the biggest annoyance in Linux hate-spam from SCO?
My big lesson in all this is that you can only do what you can do. Put another way, unless you're really passionate about the goals and ideals of your client/customer, don't sweat it if they want to do things in the silliest way possible. Your duty as a programmer/consultant/wonk is to point out where things might go astray and recommend going the other direction. But if The International House of Monoliths really wants to make stupid choices, hop in the boat and go down with the crew. Do not lose sleep over it.
Of course, in academic or more-idealistic environments, you should feel free to die on every hill if you wish.
Life's too short, friends. Think I'm gonna lose sleep because my latest client has chosen to ignore just about every Java best practice under the sun (under the Sun, even)? A resounding "heck no", I tell you! Think my managers will lose sleep when the time comes to fire my ass because the whole app has turned into the programming equivalent of Viet Nam? Lemme have a "heck no" from the crowd! I say, let 'em lay in their hastily-made and uncomfortable beds. Yes, it's demoralizing, but it's better to me than fighting with your customers/clients only to lose in the end.
In acquiescence, there is bliss.
>> Of the "requirments" you are given, concentrate on the one's that will actually solve the customer's problem. The rest are political/cosmetic. Do you want a beautiful failre, or an ugly success?
- Ace, then the real world is like this: customers/clients couldn't give a flying fudgecicle how well code work - they want it to look pretty and Cover Their Assess politically. Above that, if it actually has functionality, that's gravy.
In case you haven't noticed, all-too-often a project's success or viability is tied in large part directly to those aforementioned "political/cosmetic" requir[e]ments. I'm just saying, if you're going to be all you-took-the-red-pill-so-deal-with-the-real-world
Yeah, that's a cynical, under-informed blanket statement, but it's not too far off the mark. "Requirements" as a rule have much less to do with business rules and much more to do with animated GIF's, unfortunately.
My two cents: keep the change.
One of the (myriad) problems with Windows is that by integrating everything - by trying to do everything - it actually winds up not doing any one thing very well.
Linux is an outstanding OS - particularly as a server environment. That's where the bucks are in sales and service anyway: why compete with OS X? I use both Linux and OS X every day, and I wouldn't dare try to combine them/integrate them. They're each brilliant at what I need them for, but they'd be wholly inadequate if their roles were reversed somehow.
OS X will never be Linux, but if people spend time trying to make Linux behave like Jaguar/Panther/whatever, doesn't that undermine Linux as a whole?
Am I the only one humming the first few bars of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra here?
Eerie.
Michael Bolton. Yes, that's right. The bad-ass, perpetually angry programmer from the classic "Office Space" is the prototype of what a software developer should be portrayed as in a movie. And since his brilliant scheme is thwarted by a bug, all the better!
I am a Java developer and would love nothing more, but luckily my fantasies are much more attainable: like sleeping with Jenny McCarthy or learning to read minds.
If you're betting on Java to replace the desktop, I will take that bet any day of the week: I like those odds.
If, however, you're looking to the Java community to create the next killer app, redefine personal computing, etc, that could happen.
Just set your goals, skippy.
No no no! There is no UNLESS. There is just NO, it won't win. I know this sucks to admit. Listen, I'm a Mac person: I'm well acquainted with the bitter taste of having a 3rd-rate, bug-ridden piece of bloatware being a standard. But move past it.
Let me tell you, Bill Gates is SO beyond thinking about the desktop. It's the advantage of having oodles of cash, you see, but he's already targeting emerging markets (tablets, wireless, etc).
The battle, she is over. And it wasn't even much of a fight. And if the tech community stays mired in the "we're better, how come they won't notice that?" conversation, M$ will run right past us all and own the next big thing.
Stop trying to re-do what Microsoft has already undone. Think of what else is out there to do, change the whole paradim, not the perception.
Look, to some extent you're right: the grunts at any company grow bitter with how the muck-mucks in the Mercedes' (Mercedi?) market their blood sweat and tears. Anyone here ever had a meeting with a Marketing VP in which your eyes didn't roll at least once? 'Nuff said.
But I think this is unique to software development companies. Do the people working the 3rd shift line at the GM parts plant care as much about how the next Taurus is marketed as we do about the next version of our own company's software? Nope. I'm curious as to why this is, although I suspect that it's got something to do with there being an artistic component to programming that isn't necessarily (notice I didn't say "never") there for the auto parts manufacturer.
So, the problem is that if you create art for a corporation, they will use it and sell it, and you might not like how/why they do it. Moreover, the corporation is likely to seize on what type of your art sells well and market that into oblivion, letting the rest of your art get shelved.
Let's say you're an artist for an art factory and you start out doing Cube-ist stuff, and then you start to get into Avant Garde stuff, and your boss at the art factory says "Hey, screw that: more people shaped like shoe-boxes, you!" That's what we've got here. Microsoft's programmers are in some ways victims of their predecessor's success.
Poor, poor Microsofties.... *sniffle*
Oh man. I had "vagrant" on my forehead. Shoot, another club I don't quite fit into.
You realize, Nostradamus, that at the current rate that Linux is chipping away at Microsoft, your predictions will come true...in roughly the year 2050. At which time, are you telling me Linux is still going to be the major player? I doubt even Linus would make that guess. The market is flooded with Windows boxes and we're in a recession. Think people are eager to switch to something else, even if its free? That means buying books, buying manuals, buying friends who know this stuff dinner.
The "war" such as it is has been lost, for a long time. Evolution is the only thing that's gonna stop M$, and it will. But if you're waiting for the giant Asteroid to wipe them off them map, good luck. Look at how long cockroaches have survived.