I agree completely with the article IF the company in question has the self discipline to buy some piece of COTS that does %80 of what they need and...
LEAVE IT ALONE
Too many times organizations I've been in buy a piece of COTS (using the %80 metric even) and then start tweaking and nudging and twisting - until they are hostages to the company who sold them the COTS and made the changes for them.
Essentially having built their own customized solution out of an expensive piece of COTS.
If that is what this new "Idea" is - a better way where? to what??
In the begining there was a very small group of people (not a marketroid among them IIRC), and they had an idea to make a really interesting and fun tool.
That was the Idea (of course, I am sure that they hoped to make a good living at it too!)
"The Box" and its OS were the embodiment of that idea.
And it was a pretty cool tool/toy for quite a while...
Now, we have a large consortium of "partners" (Both HW and SW!) a committee of committees... Together, they take this Idea... and we will get the lowest common denominator filtered through the gastrointestinal tracts of a dozen committees.
I don't think it is going to be very pretty.
I don't think it is going to be very elegant.
Maybe I'm wrong - I hope so, I own a number of Amigas and I enjoy using them. But design by meta committee does not seem likely to produce anything I'll want to buy. Especially when each committee is working more with an eye to shareholder value and market positioning, not elegance, not the creation of a really cool tool.
"It is an exciting new mega trend in the industry and we are excited about being at the forefront of this next great wave in computing history." - great, a "mega trend" and a new wave to surf... I think I see where any great "Idea" will be lost at sea.
Its been said before - "sigh".
I wonder if the Amiga would have been quite so good if Commodore had ever had a live marketing "brain" on staff. Perhaps the quality of the tool would have decayed so quickly that there wouldn't have been time to develop the community that it did.
There is an "Amiga Curse" but it is a peculiar one:
first too little marketing, now too much.
or perhaps more precisely:
First too much cool tool and no marketing, now too much marketing and no cool tool.
Oh well, enough "what ifs", time to see if I can get my hands on a copy of BeOS, get a nice NetBSD install going on an old Mac, and finally configure my Linux box the way I'd like it. I'll still check in on the Amiga scene from time to time, I'll still keep my HW. But I no longer expect anything from Gateway... let alone anything good, cool, or elegant.
Slashdot Mirror
LEAVE IT ALONE
Too many times organizations I've been in buy a piece of COTS (using the %80 metric even) and then start tweaking and nudging and twisting - until they are hostages to the company who sold them the COTS and made the changes for them.
Essentially having built their own customized solution out of an expensive piece of COTS.
Just a nuance, but an interesting one.
If that is what this new "Idea" is - a better way where? to what??
In the begining there was a very small group of people (not a marketroid among them IIRC), and they had an idea to make a really interesting and fun tool.
That was the Idea (of course, I am sure that they hoped to make a good living at it too!)
"The Box" and its OS were the embodiment of that idea.
And it was a pretty cool tool/toy for quite a while...
Now, we have a large consortium of "partners" (Both HW and SW!) a committee of committees...
Together, they take this Idea...
and we will get the lowest common denominator filtered through the gastrointestinal tracts of a dozen committees.
I don't think it is going to be very pretty.
I don't think it is going to be very elegant.
Maybe I'm wrong - I hope so, I own a number of Amigas and I enjoy using them. But design by meta committee does not seem likely to produce anything I'll want to buy. Especially when each committee is working more with an eye to shareholder value and market positioning, not elegance, not the creation of a really cool tool.
"It is an exciting new mega trend in the industry and we are excited about being at the forefront of this next great wave in computing history." - great, a "mega trend" and a new wave to surf... I think I see where any great "Idea" will be lost at sea.
Its been said before - "sigh".
I wonder if the Amiga would have been quite so good if Commodore had ever had a live marketing "brain" on staff. Perhaps the quality of the tool would have decayed so quickly that there wouldn't have been time to develop the community that it did.
There is an "Amiga Curse" but it is a peculiar one:
first too little marketing, now too much.
or perhaps more precisely:
First too much cool tool and no marketing, now too much marketing and no cool tool.
Oh well, enough "what ifs", time to see if I can get my hands on a copy of BeOS, get a nice NetBSD install going on an old Mac, and finally configure my Linux box the way I'd like it. I'll still check in on the Amiga scene from time to time, I'll still keep my HW. But I no longer expect anything from Gateway... let alone anything good, cool, or elegant.