"Problem is no existing netbook has anything like the battery life of one of these."
Wait and see. What's the battery life of your average smartphone when a data connection is active? Two/three hours max? You can get that on a netbook too.
"NOBODY BUT COMPUTER TECHIES KNOW WHAT A CLIENT IS, NEVERMIND A RICH ONE."
Still they use them everyday, which is what counts.
"Sorry to be a bit of a dick about it, but if you couldn't see such a simple reason, then god help you."
Don't be so sorry. You are a dick because you are a dick -with an absolute lack of imagination on top of that. That you are able to regurgitate the last info you got from a "tech blog" makes you an informed dick, not an knowledgeable expert.
"That sounds a lot like XUL which Firefox has supported for a while and nobody uses (except for Firefox extensions)."
Obviously not. XUL was a very founded idea: that both developers and users want a standard deployment platform. Whenever a 'de facto' standard rises, you get to see its success aggregating developer efforts being it Windows at the OS level, Access at the DB frontend, "the browser" at the Internet level, etc.
Users like it because they find it an easy concept to grasp; developers like it because they give them a consistent platform to program against. XUL was meant to be that "standard platform" for Internet-based rich applications by perusing the "internet browser" concept. But then, in order to gain adepts it forcibly needed to run on "the browsers" which, at the time, mainly meant "internet explorer". Since XUL never run on IE (I can understand whil not share Microsoft's position 'ut ActiveX ut nihil') it never run in practice on "the browser" and that meant a clash in paradigms. No wonder it failed.
"in Spanish it doesn't go that way and a dromedary is not a camel, hence my confusion"
Oh!, and I forget this (because I never knew of anybody really using it except as a biologist's curiosity): in Spanish there *are* two kinds of camels, only they are not bactrian and dromedarian but bactrian and pardalian, being the pardal camel also known as giraffe (its linnean genre is 'Camelopardalis' so it makes sense).
"When I use a P2P client to download a torrent, invariably it reaches a point where my internet connection slows to a crawl, then stops. Then nothing connects, neither my browser, email or P2P client. I have to toggle the power on the cable modem, and after it reboots and reconnects, everything is peachy for a few hours"
Blame the router: that's typical symptom on P2P over cheap routers of congestion problems with the connection-tracking table,.
"This is slashdot - you HAVE to mention "The Camel Book""
Even when its a dromedary, not a camel. But then, Larry Wall is known directly from Perl, not by a book about Perl (I didn't mention Eric Allman regarding "the bat" for the same reason).
"I'm writing a tech book as well and I deliberately skipped O'Reilly for an altogether different reason. I never liked how their books all look the same; it gives me a definite "work for hire" vibe whenever I look at their stuff."
Your choice. Only remember O'Reilly has a reputation pwizard2 hasn't. Whenever I'm looking for a book on the IT field I go to O'Reilly first. You can bet that if I find a suitable one on "the animal's collection" against one from pwizard2 your chances are slim (and that's taking into account that I found the pwizard2's book on the issue, which is quite a bit to say).
"every time I see one of their books, I think "Oh, here's an O'Reilly book" instead of "Oh, here's a book written by $author." I'm writing a book mainly to get exposure and to help open other doors career-wise down the road"
"The bat" about sendmail: Brian Costales. "The grasshopper" about bind: Cricket Liu. "The armadillo" about essentials on system administration: Aeleen Frisch
Just on top of my mind. I bought them because of the reputation of the editor and I remember the authors because of the quality of the result (which, in turn, feedsback the collection reputation) *and* the easyness of the branding. Don't understimate a good branding campaign.
"there are entire engineering firms who spend all their time doing nothing but that."
Yes. And do you know why there are "entire firms" doing and maintaining high resilience electrical systems? Migth it be because other companies that see electricity as a really critical asset OUTSOURCE THE DAMN THING TO THEM?
" I make a very good living sifting through the rubble [...] I certainly don't want you listening to me for free now when I can bill the hell out of you for listening to me later."
"At the time it wasn't a dead cert that the 747 was going to be a success."
Looking at the number of transoceanic travelers and its tendence it was obvious that lowering the per-passenger costs and increasing capacity was a no-brainer.
"Some people probably thought there was obvious profit to be made from Concorde"
Which only makes my point stronger. See that I didn't say that 747 benefits were *certain* but that they were *obvious*. The same is true for Concorde: at least for those that put money in the project the positive prospects were obvious -time demonstrated they were not certain. On hindsight the "why" comes obvious and I already stated it: while the 747 directly answered to a certain tendence -lowering per passenger costs and increasing capactiy at current conditions (those of, say, the 707 or DC-8; but it even was protected against planned obsolescense: its double deck was in place to recover costs as a cargo plane in case supersonic airliners won the transoceanic battle and its wide cabin allowed it to survive as a militar cargo plane too), the Concorde project "abused" an unstated asumption that in the end resulted false: "those that currently cross the Atlantic in seven to nine hours will be mad about crossing it in four and a half"... specially if you can only take the advantage if flying from London or Paris but not from Madrid, Berlin, Roma, Bucarest, Bern, Helsinki, etc.
"After you get there, you own Mars and pretty much all the resources in the asteroid belt."
What for?
"If someone wants to prevent it, they have to build a comparable space presence"
Again, what for?
While I can see the bussiness plan on about two century timespan, the only need to control outerspace is in order to control outerspace bussiness... but currently there's no outerspace bussiness to start with!
"Didn't Boeing take a bit of a risk with the 747 since it would take many decades to recover the cost of its development?"
You forget two things: 1) As already said, those were the gold days of old when beancounters and quarterly profits still weren't the all and everything. 2) While there was risk involved there was obvious profit to be made. Where's the obvious profit on a tripulated mission to Mars, the Moon or even low orbit vehicles?
"If electricity is critical to your business, then you get an on-site electricity provider ("generator")."
Which, of course, you get built in premises by your own staff that will be in charge of maintenance too. It probably will be a diesel one and you will extract your own oil and will refine it on your own refineries, don't you?
"Also, electricity is a lot less complicated than IT. Oh its big, brutish, and "zappy", but configuration options are very limited. Bad analogy."
That's the biggest bullshit I saw in years. From water jumps to nuclear centrals, distribution control centers, vast amounts of civil engineering... it's more that bullshit: it's plain absurd since you have tons of IT included on the electricity loop!
"If its a technology startup, or anything in the information-heavy industry, outsourcing IT will leave you without the expertise to grow your infrastructure as your company grows. Now you've also outsourced your growth."
That's a *completly* different issue. I'm of the same opinion but that doesn't render the question "should I outsource?" unvaluable nor makes any difference on my statement that most of what makes a company run is outsourced even if you take it so for granted you even don't see it.
"If the core of your business has to do with information management, then outsourcing your IT is insane."
So a software mill should build its own development PCs or can it outsource this to a third party? What about IDEs, app servers (should it develop its own version of a JBoss-like?) core libraries, the Operative System...? If such a company can outsource all of this (well within IT realm) why shouldn't it consider outsourcing sysadmin, network management or helpdesk tasks?
" I've had C-level management at big-pharma (more than one) tell me that they consider information and its management to be the core value of their business."
Of course yes, but maybe they were thinking more on patents and R+D and less about printers or plain fileservers than you might realize.
"The real issue is, if the admin is in your employ he isn't working for anyone else."
I think you still don't get it: you can have it part time both onboard or outsourced; you can have full time (even with on-call duties) onboard or outsourced. It really does have *nothing* to do with the contractual relationship but with the contract terms. If the contract with the outsourcer says your sysadmin will have complete dedication, so it will be; if it will be shared, the same; do you want 356 days/year with substitutions on illness and vacations? No problem: that's the bill.
The main differences are:
* Loyaties: even if the person is working for you 24x7 his loyalties (or lack of them) should and will go to her contractor (be it you or the outsourcer).
* Expenditures: OPEX vs CAPEX. In some situation it so advantageous to move from OPEX to CAPEX that companies will want to expend twice and even more on outsourcing due to that.
* Burocracy: even minor changes on duties or responsabilities that would happen in five minutes with a short conversation in the case of a direct employee can shoot a paperwork mountain in case of outsourcing.
* Employee rights and protections: if it's not your employee it's not your problem (an on-job accident or illness? the outsourcer problem; training? the outsourcer problem; you want to get rid of the employee? the outsourcer problem; guilds, unions, strikes, vacations...? the outsourcer problem.
"Seems fair. Personally, i don't see why a company should refuse to do all service on-site."
Probably because the whole story went untold. While it can be true that small IT companies might not have the head count to offer on-site to their clients, I'd bet the untold part of the story goes more or less like "the company refused to service on-site for the peanuts I offered". Given that 8x5 on-site outsourced (I think that's the option he was looking for) will usually be overall more expensive than a direct hiring (since vacations, training, replacements, failed recruitements... all go to the provider's expenses) probably that's the point.
"we have a setup where data maintenance and system maintenance are separate due to encryption. The number of people who have the data decryption keys is much smaller than the number of people who have access to patch the system."
Are you sure those that administer the system can't install a keylogger that will take the key from those who have it? Are you sure all traffic is cyphered through the network so those that administer the systems won't be able to sniff it? Are you sure the data is either not cached or still cyphered on the clients so the people admining them can't get access to it? Are you sure the guys with the keys won't ask to the sys guys help with some problem in a way that will get them gain access to the keys? Not even through social eng. like "I'll have to reboot the server three times in the next three (off time) hours, will you stay here to enter the key then? -Oh, I'll write down the key on this paper and I'll go to sleep"? Are you sure the data is still cyphered on the backups?
Surely you have listened to horror stories where a bad, bad hacker manages to get the data he is looking for jumping through all kinds of firewalls, physical and social barriers... Now imagine the hacker already has "legal" physical access to your installation and already knows the internal organization and the admin access tokens to your systems. Well, that's your average sysadmin.
What I don't quite understand is why those positions are typically so badly payed disregarding the responsibility a company puts in their hands. Heck, even a minion beancounter usually gets higher wages "because of the responsibility".
"Say it costs around 200K for a small biz to keep it's IT staff [...] The actual costs associated with "lost" [...] represent MILLIONS! Hmmm, gonna have to think about that...."
Of course you gonna have to think about that because you took the wrong equation. I'll rewrite it for you: For the start up it costs 200K/year to be paid *now* against potential millions nobody has still seen to be realized, maybe, *in the future*. Yes, I think it rises a second thougth.
"give a damn whether or not you are successful next quarter!!!"
For too many companies, but specially for start ups that may be the difference between continuing operations or close the show. And then, what will happen to all your dear employees?
"Out-sourcing looks great on paper"
Maybe because it's not such a bad idea? Or your company produces its own electricity, paper, ink, computers... and has its own courier service, meals, hi quality reprography, marketing campaigns... Not: the truth is that most bussiness operations are *already* outsourced so asking about the value of outsourcing IT too is quite a valid question. The answer may be "yes" or "not", depending on circumnstances (in my opinion it should be "not" for almost any startup with an expectation of growing in the next years), but it certainly is a valid question.
"Having huge patent exchanges was his quick way to secure as much of his company's IP from being pillaged by patent trolls"
I don't think a "patent troll" is what you think it is.
When you produce real goods you want to protect your IP through patents mainly to avoid competing companies to get your innovations without the expensive R+D process or to block your product line. These are defensive patents; they might be ludicrous but they are still defensive (if you try to sue me for violating your patent X on my products -that's the key point, I'll counterattack with my patent Y your products violate, so we better settle). On top of this, big corps use them to rise the barrier for new competitors to enter the playground (as soon as they start to look as a menace they can bury them with their own patent portfolio and the newcomers won't be able to counterattack since they haven't had time to develop their own defensive one). That's why big corps lobyied for current stupid patent system, so they could be granted hugh amounts of patents yearly without out of proportion R+D expenditures.
On the other hand, a patent troll does not produce anything except patents themselves, thus being immune to this kind of counterattack (...I'll counterattack with my patent Y your products violate... wait a minute! what products?). As big corps are starting to realize collecting massive amounts of defensive patents won't protect them from patent trolls; a sane patent system would do (is really that patent non-trivial, innovative, detailed and at least a prototype already produced?). Of course those very big corps were lobbying for about fifty years just to make impossible for a sane patent system to exist so to some extent those patent trolls are the Nemesis for a kind of poetical justice.
Slashdot Mirror
"Problem is no existing netbook has anything like the battery life of one of these."
Wait and see. What's the battery life of your average smartphone when a data connection is active? Two/three hours max? You can get that on a netbook too.
"NOBODY BUT COMPUTER TECHIES KNOW WHAT A CLIENT IS, NEVERMIND A RICH ONE."
Still they use them everyday, which is what counts.
"Sorry to be a bit of a dick about it, but if you couldn't see such a simple reason, then god help you."
Don't be so sorry. You are a dick because you are a dick -with an absolute lack of imagination on top of that. That you are able to regurgitate the last info you got from a "tech blog" makes you an informed dick, not an knowledgeable expert.
"That sounds a lot like XUL which Firefox has supported for a while and nobody uses (except for Firefox extensions)."
Obviously not. XUL was a very founded idea: that both developers and users want a standard deployment platform. Whenever a 'de facto' standard rises, you get to see its success aggregating developer efforts being it Windows at the OS level, Access at the DB frontend, "the browser" at the Internet level, etc.
Users like it because they find it an easy concept to grasp; developers like it because they give them a consistent platform to program against. XUL was meant to be that "standard platform" for Internet-based rich applications by perusing the "internet browser" concept. But then, in order to gain adepts it forcibly needed to run on "the browsers" which, at the time, mainly meant "internet explorer". Since XUL never run on IE (I can understand whil not share Microsoft's position 'ut ActiveX ut nihil') it never run in practice on "the browser" and that meant a clash in paradigms. No wonder it failed.
"in Spanish it doesn't go that way and a dromedary is not a camel, hence my confusion"
Oh!, and I forget this (because I never knew of anybody really using it except as a biologist's curiosity): in Spanish there *are* two kinds of camels, only they are not bactrian and dromedarian but bactrian and pardalian, being the pardal camel also known as giraffe (its linnean genre is 'Camelopardalis' so it makes sense).
"How can it be a dromedary and not a camel? Dromedaries are camels. One hump == dromedary camel, two humps == bactrian camel."
You learn a thing everyday... in Spanish it doesn't go that way and a dromedary is not a camel, hence my confusion. Thanks for the info.
"When I use a P2P client to download a torrent, invariably it reaches a point where my internet connection slows to a crawl, then stops. Then nothing connects, neither my browser, email or P2P client. I have to toggle the power on the cable modem, and after it reboots and reconnects, everything is peachy for a few hours"
Blame the router: that's typical symptom on P2P over cheap routers of congestion problems with the connection-tracking table,.
"This is slashdot - you HAVE to mention "The Camel Book""
Even when its a dromedary, not a camel. But then, Larry Wall is known directly from Perl, not by a book about Perl (I didn't mention Eric Allman regarding "the bat" for the same reason).
"O'Reilly seems way cooler to me than being published elsewhere"
And cooler than being published by elsevier too.
"I'm writing a tech book as well and I deliberately skipped O'Reilly for an altogether different reason. I never liked how their books all look the same; it gives me a definite "work for hire" vibe whenever I look at their stuff."
Your choice. Only remember O'Reilly has a reputation pwizard2 hasn't. Whenever I'm looking for a book on the IT field I go to O'Reilly first. You can bet that if I find a suitable one on "the animal's collection" against one from pwizard2 your chances are slim (and that's taking into account that I found the pwizard2's book on the issue, which is quite a bit to say).
"every time I see one of their books, I think "Oh, here's an O'Reilly book" instead of "Oh, here's a book written by $author." I'm writing a book mainly to get exposure and to help open other doors career-wise down the road"
"The bat" about sendmail: Brian Costales.
"The grasshopper" about bind: Cricket Liu.
"The armadillo" about essentials on system administration: Aeleen Frisch
Just on top of my mind. I bought them because of the reputation of the editor and I remember the authors because of the quality of the result (which, in turn, feedsback the collection reputation) *and* the easyness of the branding. Don't understimate a good branding campaign.
"there are entire engineering firms who spend all their time doing nothing but that."
Yes. And do you know why there are "entire firms" doing and maintaining high resilience electrical systems? Migth it be because other companies that see electricity as a really critical asset OUTSOURCE THE DAMN THING TO THEM?
" I make a very good living sifting through the rubble [...] I certainly don't want you listening to me for free now when I can bill the hell out of you for listening to me later."
May that happen by me OUTSOURCING IT TO YOU?
"It only looks that way with hindsight."
No, it doesn't.
"At the time it wasn't a dead cert that the 747 was going to be a success."
Looking at the number of transoceanic travelers and its tendence it was obvious that lowering the per-passenger costs and increasing capacity was a no-brainer.
"Some people probably thought there was obvious profit to be made from Concorde"
Which only makes my point stronger. See that I didn't say that 747 benefits were *certain* but that they were *obvious*. The same is true for Concorde: at least for those that put money in the project the positive prospects were obvious -time demonstrated they were not certain. On hindsight the "why" comes obvious and I already stated it: while the 747 directly answered to a certain tendence -lowering per passenger costs and increasing capactiy at current conditions (those of, say, the 707 or DC-8; but it even was protected against planned obsolescense: its double deck was in place to recover costs as a cargo plane in case supersonic airliners won the transoceanic battle and its wide cabin allowed it to survive as a militar cargo plane too), the Concorde project "abused" an unstated asumption that in the end resulted false: "those that currently cross the Atlantic in seven to nine hours will be mad about crossing it in four and a half"... specially if you can only take the advantage if flying from London or Paris but not from Madrid, Berlin, Roma, Bucarest, Bern, Helsinki, etc.
"After you get there, you own Mars and pretty much all the resources in the asteroid belt."
What for?
"If someone wants to prevent it, they have to build a comparable space presence"
Again, what for?
While I can see the bussiness plan on about two century timespan, the only need to control outerspace is in order to control outerspace bussiness... but currently there's no outerspace bussiness to start with!
"Didn't Boeing take a bit of a risk with the 747 since it would take many decades to recover the cost of its development?"
You forget two things:
1) As already said, those were the gold days of old when beancounters and quarterly profits still weren't the all and everything.
2) While there was risk involved there was obvious profit to be made. Where's the obvious profit on a tripulated mission to Mars, the Moon or even low orbit vehicles?
Yessure, but don't count on Coppola this time: he's living with E. Presley his golden retire.
"If electricity is critical to your business, then you get an on-site electricity provider ("generator")."
Which, of course, you get built in premises by your own staff that will be in charge of maintenance too. It probably will be a diesel one and you will extract your own oil and will refine it on your own refineries, don't you?
"Also, electricity is a lot less complicated than IT. Oh its big, brutish, and "zappy", but configuration options are very limited. Bad analogy."
That's the biggest bullshit I saw in years. From water jumps to nuclear centrals, distribution control centers, vast amounts of civil engineering... it's more that bullshit: it's plain absurd since you have tons of IT included on the electricity loop!
"If its a technology startup, or anything in the information-heavy industry, outsourcing IT will leave you without the expertise to grow your infrastructure as your company grows. Now you've also outsourced your growth."
That's a *completly* different issue. I'm of the same opinion but that doesn't render the question "should I outsource?" unvaluable nor makes any difference on my statement that most of what makes a company run is outsourced even if you take it so for granted you even don't see it.
"If the core of your business has to do with information management, then outsourcing your IT is insane."
So a software mill should build its own development PCs or can it outsource this to a third party? What about IDEs, app servers (should it develop its own version of a JBoss-like?) core libraries, the Operative System...? If such a company can outsource all of this (well within IT realm) why shouldn't it consider outsourcing sysadmin, network management or helpdesk tasks?
" I've had C-level management at big-pharma (more than one) tell me that they consider information and its management to be the core value of their business."
Of course yes, but maybe they were thinking more on patents and R+D and less about printers or plain fileservers than you might realize.
"The real issue is, if the admin is in your employ he isn't working for anyone else."
I think you still don't get it: you can have it part time both onboard or outsourced; you can have full time (even with on-call duties) onboard or outsourced. It really does have *nothing* to do with the contractual relationship but with the contract terms. If the contract with the outsourcer says your sysadmin will have complete dedication, so it will be; if it will be shared, the same; do you want 356 days/year with substitutions on illness and vacations? No problem: that's the bill.
The main differences are:
* Loyaties: even if the person is working for you 24x7 his loyalties (or lack of them) should and will go to her contractor (be it you or the outsourcer).
* Expenditures: OPEX vs CAPEX. In some situation it so advantageous to move from OPEX to CAPEX that companies will want to expend twice and even more on outsourcing due to that.
* Burocracy: even minor changes on duties or responsabilities that would happen in five minutes with a short conversation in the case of a direct employee can shoot a paperwork mountain in case of outsourcing.
* Employee rights and protections: if it's not your employee it's not your problem (an on-job accident or illness? the outsourcer problem; training? the outsourcer problem; you want to get rid of the employee? the outsourcer problem; guilds, unions, strikes, vacations...? the outsourcer problem.
"A common defensive technique. X isn't the REAL X, so it doesn't count!"
That's called the "no true scotsman" fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman).
"Seems fair. Personally, i don't see why a company should refuse to do all service on-site."
Probably because the whole story went untold. While it can be true that small IT companies might not have the head count to offer on-site to their clients, I'd bet the untold part of the story goes more or less like "the company refused to service on-site for the peanuts I offered". Given that 8x5 on-site outsourced (I think that's the option he was looking for) will usually be overall more expensive than a direct hiring (since vacations, training, replacements, failed recruitements... all go to the provider's expenses) probably that's the point.
"Outsourcing critical business infrastructure is simply insane."
Last I reviewed electricity was critical for the vast majority of bussiness. Still the vast majority of bussiness outsource this service successfully.
"Because you control the hiring/firing process with on-site Admins."
You can have on-site sysadmins directly contracted by your company or through an outsourcer.
You can have remote sysadmins directly contracted by your company or through an outsourcer.
I know, I've gone through all the four posibilities.
So your point is, again?
"we have a setup where data maintenance and system maintenance are separate due to encryption. The number of people who have the data decryption keys is much smaller than the number of people who have access to patch the system."
Are you sure those that administer the system can't install a keylogger that will take the key from those who have it?
Are you sure all traffic is cyphered through the network so those that administer the systems won't be able to sniff it?
Are you sure the data is either not cached or still cyphered on the clients so the people admining them can't get access to it?
Are you sure the guys with the keys won't ask to the sys guys help with some problem in a way that will get them gain access to the keys?
Not even through social eng. like "I'll have to reboot the server three times in the next three (off time) hours, will you stay here to enter the key then? -Oh, I'll write down the key on this paper and I'll go to sleep"?
Are you sure the data is still cyphered on the backups?
Surely you have listened to horror stories where a bad, bad hacker manages to get the data he is looking for jumping through all kinds of firewalls, physical and social barriers... Now imagine the hacker already has "legal" physical access to your installation and already knows the internal organization and the admin access tokens to your systems. Well, that's your average sysadmin.
What I don't quite understand is why those positions are typically so badly payed disregarding the responsibility a company puts in their hands. Heck, even a minion beancounter usually gets higher wages "because of the responsibility".
"Say it costs around 200K for a small biz to keep it's IT staff [...] The actual costs associated with "lost" [...] represent MILLIONS! Hmmm, gonna have to think about that...."
Of course you gonna have to think about that because you took the wrong equation. I'll rewrite it for you:
For the start up it costs 200K/year to be paid *now* against potential millions nobody has still seen to be realized, maybe, *in the future*. Yes, I think it rises a second thougth.
"give a damn whether or not you are successful next quarter!!!"
For too many companies, but specially for start ups that may be the difference between continuing operations or close the show. And then, what will happen to all your dear employees?
"Out-sourcing looks great on paper"
Maybe because it's not such a bad idea? Or your company produces its own electricity, paper, ink, computers... and has its own courier service, meals, hi quality reprography, marketing campaigns... Not: the truth is that most bussiness operations are *already* outsourced so asking about the value of outsourcing IT too is quite a valid question. The answer may be "yes" or "not", depending on circumnstances (in my opinion it should be "not" for almost any startup with an expectation of growing in the next years), but it certainly is a valid question.
"...and somewhere between halting and incompleteness, Omega sits, mocking us."
What the f*...? My Omega is no sitting but on my wrist ticking Ok and it's automatic, so no halting problem nor incompleteness, no sir.
No.
"Having huge patent exchanges was his quick way to secure as much of his company's IP from being pillaged by patent trolls"
I don't think a "patent troll" is what you think it is.
When you produce real goods you want to protect your IP through patents mainly to avoid competing companies to get your innovations without the expensive R+D process or to block your product line. These are defensive patents; they might be ludicrous but they are still defensive (if you try to sue me for violating your patent X on my products -that's the key point, I'll counterattack with my patent Y your products violate, so we better settle). On top of this, big corps use them to rise the barrier for new competitors to enter the playground (as soon as they start to look as a menace they can bury them with their own patent portfolio and the newcomers won't be able to counterattack since they haven't had time to develop their own defensive one). That's why big corps lobyied for current stupid patent system, so they could be granted hugh amounts of patents yearly without out of proportion R+D expenditures.
On the other hand, a patent troll does not produce anything except patents themselves, thus being immune to this kind of counterattack (...I'll counterattack with my patent Y your products violate... wait a minute! what products?). As big corps are starting to realize collecting massive amounts of defensive patents won't protect them from patent trolls; a sane patent system would do (is really that patent non-trivial, innovative, detailed and at least a prototype already produced?). Of course those very big corps were lobbying for about fifty years just to make impossible for a sane patent system to exist so to some extent those patent trolls are the Nemesis for a kind of poetical justice.