Ithink Bob Young is simply recognizing a painful truth about the economy and the modern corporation in general.
The market belongs to thse who will work for it.
Be it stereos or the desktop it takes massive amounts of hard work to create a product with real appeal. Then it takes massive amounts of continuing work to hold that appeal. Microsoft
has spent millions of dollars and man hours creating thier desktop vision. They continue to spend incredible amounts of money and programming time refining it.
Apple has proven that one can re-enter this market. They have spent the last several years taking a sideline also ran unix and re-tooling it as a desktop OS. It shows. With years of hard work they have made MacOS X a serious desktop alternative.
The second truth.
Money is where you exploit it.
It's really unfair to single out Redhat here but they are a brilliant example. Redhat historicly has looked for areas where they can take an already existing product and with a minimal amount of work exploit and sell it. The internet boom was powered by just such an attitude. What Young is pointing out is that no one seems to be willing to do the immense amount of work of creating a desktop then allowing someone else to sell it.
Sure a company COULD make a serious desktop contender out of linux. You would need to hire a few hundred programmers and associated talent and spend a few years working on it. Apple has proved that this is doable. Doubtful though that any linux company will do it since the space seems mostly filled with jump in quick exploiters.
The only question remaining is what is the long term health prospects of companies that bottom feed such as redhat?
The problem with this is that the feature in easter egg form will only exist as long as it doesn't offend the advertising interests. If enough people start using it I am sure you will find that the next magic update quietly makes it go away.
Perhaps we need a top level domain.suck
whose only requirement is that the company involved is NOT allowed the name. Would be fun to have a protected space for commentary and would inherently undermine the confusion argument if it was well nown that.suck domains are commentary on the parent name by outsiders.
So the only player with enough money/power to
really challenge the network and broadcast interests is gone.
TiVo's strategy of just kiss as and remove any feature the broacasters don't like (30 second skip for instance) has always offended me.
Replay just doesn't look strong enough financially to hold on.
Say what you will about BillCo but I don't think a further reduction in the choice of new media is anything to rejoice about.
IMHO more importsnt to open source than the linux distro is gcc.
What happens to cygnus when AOL buys out RedHat mostly for the name? I have a difficult time imagining that the over inflated ponzai scheme called AOL is really interested in the cross compatibility of a compiler.
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Ithink Bob Young is simply recognizing a painful truth about the economy and the modern corporation in general. The market belongs to thse who will work for it. Be it stereos or the desktop it takes massive amounts of hard work to create a product with real appeal. Then it takes massive amounts of continuing work to hold that appeal. Microsoft has spent millions of dollars and man hours creating thier desktop vision. They continue to spend incredible amounts of money and programming time refining it. Apple has proven that one can re-enter this market. They have spent the last several years taking a sideline also ran unix and re-tooling it as a desktop OS. It shows. With years of hard work they have made MacOS X a serious desktop alternative. The second truth. Money is where you exploit it. It's really unfair to single out Redhat here but they are a brilliant example. Redhat historicly has looked for areas where they can take an already existing product and with a minimal amount of work exploit and sell it. The internet boom was powered by just such an attitude. What Young is pointing out is that no one seems to be willing to do the immense amount of work of creating a desktop then allowing someone else to sell it. Sure a company COULD make a serious desktop contender out of linux. You would need to hire a few hundred programmers and associated talent and spend a few years working on it. Apple has proved that this is doable. Doubtful though that any linux company will do it since the space seems mostly filled with jump in quick exploiters. The only question remaining is what is the long term health prospects of companies that bottom feed such as redhat?
The problem with this is that the feature in easter egg form will only exist as long as it doesn't offend the advertising interests. If enough people start using it I am sure you will find that the next magic update quietly makes it go away.
Perhaps we need a top level domain .suck
whose only requirement is that the company involved is NOT allowed the name. Would be fun to have a protected space for commentary and would inherently undermine the confusion argument if it was well nown that .suck domains are commentary on the parent name by outsiders.
So the only player with enough money/power to really challenge the network and broadcast interests is gone. TiVo's strategy of just kiss as and remove any feature the broacasters don't like (30 second skip for instance) has always offended me. Replay just doesn't look strong enough financially to hold on. Say what you will about BillCo but I don't think a further reduction in the choice of new media is anything to rejoice about.
IMHO more importsnt to open source than the linux distro is gcc. What happens to cygnus when AOL buys out RedHat mostly for the name? I have a difficult time imagining that the over inflated ponzai scheme called AOL is really interested in the cross compatibility of a compiler.