An example: I was talking with a tech support guy who worked at one of the major universities here in Boston (ahem, Harvard, ahem), and he mentioned that they were starting to use Linux on some of their servers. Great, I said; which distribution? He looked at me as if I had asked him the stupidest question in the world, and said "6.0, of course."
That was a GREAT story. You can be sure I'll be relating your parable around many company campfires in the next few weeks to a lot of Suits that THINK they know open source but don't know jackware from slackware. Unfortunately I have to deal with them all the time.. but stories like yours really nail a point.
at least $1 is donated to the FSF for every sold package.
When you're examining the apportioning of the pie, look at how much the other parties are getting as well as how much the FSF is getting. I think you'll find that $1 is not that big of a share.
This is super cool, I think, and I probably have to buy one just because it is so cool.
Sorry to sound cynical, but this just means you've been suckered by their publicity ploy.
I think, this finally proves that - as far as this is possible for a company - RedHat cares about the community.
People need to realize that Red Hat is now a PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANY. This means all of the normal PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANY APPURTENANCES, such as a Board of Directors, SEC filings, PR departments, marketing consultants, branding consultants, market research managers and liasons, and many, many other gears of the corporate machine. It is now a very naive belief to feel that Red Hat, as a corporation, "cares" about anything or anyone other than the value of their stock. In fact, it is now the legal and moral obligation of all officers of Red Hat to do everything in their power to maximize that value.
It is truly a mistake in perception to attribute human behavioural characteristics such as "caring" to a corporate machine. A group of people in an organization with a purpose will behave differently than any individual. My favorite example of this is two forces of civil war soldiers charging each other. No sane individual would contemplate running at a group of armed enemy soldiers who are hell bent on shooting you. But as a group, you are under an extremely complex set of psychological motives, manipulations, and pressures, and it is historical fact many soldiers died in exactly such circumstances.
Now, there may very well be INDIVIDUALS at Red Hat who "care about the community." I believe this is true. But rest assured that every action taken by the CORPORATION is carefully weighed and executed based on its short and long run potential impact on that all-powerful share price, and you should keep this in mind as you evaluate a company's behaviour. Remember that shareholders are more than ready to BRING SUIT against officers of a public company who engage in actions motivated by objectives other than that share price that seem to hurt the company.
Judging by the reactions here, it was a good move for Red Hat though.
Hey, this is a notebook that may save your life someday.
Imagine if your San Francisco-to-Las Vegas plane crashes somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas in the middle of winter, you could become a hero by starting a fire with shavings from your notebook casing!
I wonder if this might start a trend for a whole class of machines like Sport-Utility Notebooks, like we have SUVs in automobile land now.
The overwhelming majority of those SUV owners never actually engage the Sport-Utility part of their Sport-Utility Vehicle i.e. these wimps never take their trucks OFF ROAD! And in fact you look at SUVs like the Lexus RX300 (adapted from the Toyota Camry of all things!) and you realize that SUVs are getting less Sportier and more Utilitier.
Personally, I think they sell so well simply because they are as functional as a station wagon for a family, but without the wussy-stigma. ^_^
So we may see a parallel in notebooks: the ruggedized rigs are the Manly Machines. You wouldn't want to be caught on a plane with the station wagon of computers now, would you?
The Mystery of the Missing Killer App
on
$200 Linux PCs
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· Score: 5
About two years ago, when PC prices began their long, unrelieved slide to levels today which would have amazed the PC buyers of the early 90s, I did some hard thinking about whether this was a whole new ballgame and what factors were at work here which I later turned into an unpublished article. Let me restate a few of the relevant points here.
NOTE: this turned into a GIGANTIC post, but I strike a blow for Penguin at the end, so hang in there! ^_^
* * *
First, pricing is a result of supply and demand forces. This is axiomatic. Thus when I observe some kind of systematic trend in prices, I infer that there are systematic changes taking place in demand, supply, or both.
On the supply side, we have Moore's law and it's cousins perpetually at work bringing down the cost-per-unit of processing power, storage, bandwidth, and every other dimension of computing. There are some irregularities to this which I'll address later but fundamentally, the past 20 years have been characterized by remarkably steady progress on the supply side.
If you accept this, then the relative stability of the average selling price of a PC between its advent in the early 80s up until roughly 1995 meant that there must have been concurrent, offsetting changes on the demand side stimulating demand for the constantly increasing supply of computing-units.
We even have a name for these demand-side stimulants. We call them Killer Apps. I my opinion, these Killer Apps are so significant to the history of the PC that one can even slice that history into phases characterized by the Killer App of the day.
I. Early DOS Era (1981 - 1984)
Spreadsheets and word processors! The first Killer Apps that drove initial sales of the PC, pushing it into the corporate mainstream. Spreadsheets, running in text mode under MS-DOS, supported several generations of hardware upgrades, because the performance improvement from each upgrade was visible and appreciable -- and contributed to
productivity.
Typical CPUs: 6502, 8086, 8088 Typical RAM and storage: 256K RAM, 180K floppies, 10MB hard disks
II. Late DOS, early GUI and Graphics Era (1984 - 1989)
With growing sales of PCs came the development of lots of other uses for them, and the advent of rapidly improving graphics. The Mac GUI and page layout software like Aldus Pagemaker were acknowledged Killer Apps. And GAMES baby!
CPUs of this Era: 80286, 80386, 68000 Typical RAM and storage: 640K RAM, 100MB hard disks
III. Late GUI and LAN Era (1990 - 1993)
As the set of tasks for which one could employ a PC grew, users began needing to easily switch between applications. Several methods were developed that allowed the PC to run concurrent programs.
The GUI imposed a significant system overhead, once again supporting demand for several generations of CPU progress. Furthermore, all the software for PCs was eventually rewritten as graphical Windows applications to facilitate multitasking and incorporate new features that the GUI environment made possible. The new code was fatter, driving demand for more/faster RAM and disk space.
This era also saw the emergence of widespread local area networks (LAN) allowing shared storage resources and launching the client-server paradigm. This segmented the PC market into client desktops and network file servers. The PC-based server was a Killer App that definitely pushed demand for computing power and divided the market into today's enterprise/desktop segments.
CPUs of this Era: 80486, 80486DX2 Typical RAM and storage: 2MB - 8MB RAM, 400MB hard disks
IV. The 32-bit Era (1994 - Present)
The next Killer App that continued this saga of seemingly perpetual demand for more hardware performance was the advent of 32-bit GUIs in the form of Windows NT and Windows 95. Applications ONCE AGAIN being rewritten for the new OS consumed even more system overhead and incorporated yet more functionality, creating another cycle of appetite for better hardware.
CPUs of this Era: Pentium, Pentium Pro, AMD K5, K6 Typical RAM and storage: 16MB - 32MB RAM, 1GB hard disks
V. Today: The Internet Era (1996 - Present)
Today's Killer App which drives sales of PCs is the Internet.
Unfortunately for the companies that had planned on continued geometric demand growth for CPU speed, RAM, and drive space, this latest Killer App doesn't require those things. Applications for browsing the web, chatting, and communicating with e-mail, in their existing form are very "light" applications which don't require supercomputing horsepower.
Meanwhile, nothing new has emerged in other areas that offers appreciable functionality for mainstream users to carry the upgrade cycle further. Spreadsheets, word processors, presentation builders, and so on have apparently attained a "functionality saturation point." I'm sure we've all heard the comment, "What MORE can a word processor do?"
Clearly, the situation bodes ill for companies such as Intel, Micron Tech, and Western Digital, who have benefited from past generations of killer apps, but look to be out in the cold this time around. In the past, killer apps doubly pumped companies like these: by (a) shifting demand curves outward, and (b) simultaneously reducing price elasticity of demand, tilting the demand curve toward the vertical. A more detailed discussion of this effect is in a separate article; here, suffice it to say that these effects combined to heavily reward vendors of these products with each advent of a new killer app.
CPUs of this Era: Pentium MMX, Pentium II, AMD K6 Typical RAM and drive space: 32MB - 64MB RAM, 2GB - 4GB hard disks
So -- are you still with me? Amazing! ^_^
The way I concluded this article two years ago was to predict a recession in the PC industry unless a new Killer App emerged. Well, I was WRONG. No new killer app surfaced, but the PC industry has been booming.
Why is this? I believe it's because although the demand level for stuffing a ton of power and storage into a single box has plateaued, the demand for the number of boxes has continued to climb, as legions of new, first-time buyers, attracted by the "network effect" enter the market. Geoffrey Moore would describe them as "Late Majority."
Supposing that this continues for a while, and average unit selling prices of PCs continue to decline, I see a couple of interesting consequences of this. The first has to do with Milton Friedman's theory of component elasticity. This theory is very simple so don't worry if you didn't make it through Econ 180. The relevant part of it states that those parts of the whole product which are a big chunk of the cost of that product will be most sensitive to changes in the market for that product. Here's how it's relevant to the PC situation. Back when the average PC cost $2000, a $100 license for the OS was only 5% of the total. So nobody worried too much about the price of the OS.
HOWEVER -- for a PC that costs $400, the OS is now the BIGGEST COMPONENT COST. Vendors have a tremendous incentive to try and reduce that cost... and guess what they're all thinking about right now?
I just now happened to be engaged in my semi-annual receive-ye-wisdom-from-the-Master-Alan-Cooper ritual. This ritual involves critically examining my most recent 6-month interval of design experience in relation to his book on design: About Face: The Essentials of UI Design.
First, a comment about the term "intuitiveness." AC discusses this term at some length and makes points about it that I agree with strongly.
A few choice excerpts starting from p. 57:
"No rational thought is evident in the process [of intuition.]... In the computer industry, and particularly in the user interface design community, the word
intuitive is often used to mean easy-to-use or easy-to-understand. I'm a big fan of easy-to-use, but it doesn't promote our craft to attribute its success to metaphysics. ... Instinct is a hard-wired response that involves no conscious thought. Intuition is one step above instinct because, although it requires no conscious thought, it is based on a web of knowledge learned consciously. ... Intuition is a middle ground between having consciously learned something and knowing something instinctively. If we have learned that things glowing red can burn us, we tend to classify all red-glowing things as potentially dangerous until proven otherwise."
I often see people in our industry confuse the terms "ease-of-use," "intuitiveness," and "instinctiveness." The last Marketing VP I worked with was fond of saying that the nipple is most intuitive interface there is. This is just flat out WRONG. The nipple is an instinctive interface -- we're born with the knowledge of how to use it. Well, some of us anyway.
Intuition, on the other hand, is a non-rational, often non-conscious process of transferring other, learned knowledge to a new set of circumstances. Definitely not true of a nipple.
Now that I've beat the "intuitive" issue into a bloody pulp, I can address David's conclusion. He said:
Entirely too many programmers think that because something is intuitive to them, it will automatically be intuitive to the rest of the world.
I respectfully disagree with the first premise. I don't think the typical programmer gives much thought to the interface or interaction elements of their work at all. How many developers do you know who give thought whatsoever to concepts like "affordances," "visual fugue," or "visual motif?" Primitives vs. idioms? Restricting the interaction space?
AC has a superbly articulated explanation for this.
"The technology paradigm of user interface design is simple and incredibly widespread in the computer industry. The technology paradigm merely means that the interface is expressed in terms of its construction--of how it was built.
... The overwhelming majority of software programs today are Metabolist in that they show us, without any hint of shame, precisely how they are built. There is one button per function, one function per module of code, and the commands and processes precisely echo the internal data structures and algorithms. ... Engineers want to know how things work, so the technology paradigm is very satisfying to them. Engineers prefer to see the gears and levers and valves because it helps them understand what is going on inside the machine... but most users don't have either the time or desire. They'd much rather be successful than be knowledgeable, a state that is often hard for engineers to understand."
(Emphasis added)
I'll add a comment to this. Many engineers fall victim to this technology paradigm, but many engineers are also (justly) proud of their efficient/clean/structured/extensible/blazingly fast design of the ENGINE. Perhaps they unconsciously resist anything that hides, conceals, or otherwise covers the beauty of their design.
Well the fact of the matter is, very few people examine the engine or transmission or suspension when buying or driving a car. In fact few people even care. Drivers are typically interested in getting where they want to go in reasonable comfort without mechanical malfunctions, running out of fuel, or having to understand the disc-brake mechanism. That's why the DESIGNERS of cars are different people than the ENGINEERS.. perhaps our industry too will someday embrace this distinction. Until then, we engineers have sole responsibility for the utility of our creations. We still mostly have to wear the interaction-designer-hat and should take the time to learn from people who spend time really thinking about these problems, like AC, and iarchitect.com.
Re:Windows is a brilliant piece of software
on
Managing Geeks
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· Score: 1
Thanks - I stand corrected!
^_^
Windows is a brilliant piece of software
on
Managing Geeks
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· Score: 2
Two or three people invent a brilliant piece of software, and then, five years later, 1,000 people do a bad job of following up on their idea. History is littered with projects that follow this pattern: Windows
Um. Say what?
If anybody did the inventing, it was Xerox PARC inventing the GUI with the GEM desktop. I used GEM way back when with apps like Ventura Publisher.. and the sad thing is, Windows has not really articulated the fundamental value of the GUI much more than GEM did.
More accurately (in my memory) the Lisa and the Mac advanced the GUI a step beyond GEM, but Windows never moved it much beyond that -- at least from an interface standpoint.
I had to take issue with that statement by Schmidt!
Today innovation drives any business. And since you don't want to outsource your innovation, you need to have your own geeks.
My first thought was that this claim, on the surface, seems to be an argument against vertically distributing your enterprise.
But on rethinking it, I recognized that a specific statement is being made here -- the value of controlling your information infrastructure. In a world where the variables defining the digital universe are constantly in flux, it helps have permanent core crew members who are in touch with them.
The truth is, you need to have a stable of technologists around -- not just to run your systems but also to help you figure out which strategies to pursue, which innovations to invest in, and which partnerships to form.
I have only found this to be true when two conditions are satisfied:
a) These technologists must have a grasp of the larger strategic business picture - they should understand concepts such as the technology adoption life cycle, Ronald Coase's theory of transaction costs, the theory of "network externalities" (whether you subscribe to it or not) and other realms typically outside off the scope of your average geek.
b) If (a) is true, management must also commit in a powerful way to trusting and embracing the input from these "renaissance geeks". In fact, such geeks should be a part of the core management team, perhaps not necessarily at a president/ceo level, but at least at a CIO/CTO level.
I've seen cases -- large companies in PARTICULAR -- where the CIO/CTO did NOT come from a technology background! These people, while hard working, smart, and enthusiastic about learning, simply don't have the gut level immersion in technology that I believe it takes to have a chance at really understanding it.
It's a fact of life: If the technologists in your company invent something ahead of everybody else, then all of a sudden your business will get bigger.
Again, only subject to condition (b) above. I'm sure that we've all had personal experience with companies within which some innovative group devised a genuinely creative and powerful concept, only to be squashed by the skepticism and lack of support from non-geek brass.
I can see how this perspective arises from the fact of Eric Schmidt being something of a geek himself.
Perhaps the last commandment missing from this article should be:
``Larry knows a lot about software, but clearly he knows very little about hardware, so he has a tendency to misjudge what the market wants,'' Enderle said. ``The last time around, he turned out to be the network computer's worst enemy, by overpromising and underdelivering.''
I have an idea -- maybe Larry was secretly on the side of the fat clients all along, and the whole thing was a ploy to buy time for software vendors. After all, Oracle is a software vendor. The plan was for him to loudly and vocally proclaim himself an advocate of NC (which he did), and then to marshal the resources of the NC backers to his banner (which he did) and then to cause said resources to flounder badly (guilty) thus giving the incumbents YEARS to address the shortcomings in their offerings revealed by the NC concept. ^_^
Readers of Ayn Rand will know what I'm talking about.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that an overworked, underpaid, and probably not all that bright reporter merely parrots things he/she is told.
"This cheap technology could be built into consumer items such as milk cartons that scroll through pictures of missing children, or one-sheet newspapers with a button to toggle through the pages."
This is silly. This ranks right up there with Div-X and Interactive TV. Sometimes you can look at an idea and say "DUMB. SHEER DUMBNESS" without being required to back up your opinion with analysis and evidence.
However this IS a COOL TECHNOLOGY, with MAJOR potential. In my humble opinion. ^_^
The display is always an integral part of the man-machine interface. Tools like the PalmPilot, your cellular phone, your wristwatch, your car's dashboard, these can potentiall benefit from a technology like this. Reduced cost, reduced weight, visible in daylight, and other advantages seem possible with this technology.
"Organic and inorganic chemistries are so dissimilar that college courses almost always separate them into two tracks."
You know, I've always thought the rigid separation of education into discrete hegemonies "Economics" "Math" "Physics" "Basketweaving" destroys a lot of good interdisciplinary idea-generating potential. Other schools may be different, but where I went to school they paid lots of lip service to the concept of interdisciplinary programs but in practice it was tough and fraught with rules/policy barriers.
"For engineers it is enough that applications work, but Clancy's team plans to explain why."
I found that kind of a revealing comment, and funny for some reason. ^_^
" 'The theories say it should not work, so we are going to take a close look to find out what is really happening,' said Thompson."
Hehe this reminds me of a quote I once heard. "Most major discoveries are not preceded by a cry of 'Eureka!' -- rather, they are typically preceded by a 'That's funny...'"
WOW. Microsoft just published a MAJOR piece of FUD on their website about Linux. Don't they realize how defensive this makes them sound? Don't they realize that entire hyperbolic theme of this piece -- well charactized by the title "Linux Myths" -- makes them look like usenet trolls?
I use MS products. VoteZone runs on SQL Server + NT + IIS. So I hope my critique of this "article" carries a little weight. ^_^
"Linux fundamentally relies on 30-year-old operating system technology and architecture."
[ This statement is obviously intended to make the reader think that Linux is somehow decrepit, obsolete, old and crusty. Well, when you "take a step back" as they say themselves, and realize that Windows NT -- the "new" technology and architecture -- has major shortcomings and reliability issues, you may think to yourself, hey maybe there are some ADVANTAGES to "relying on a 30-year old technology." ]
"Linux was not designed from the ground-up to support symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), graphical user interfaces (GUI), asynchronous I/O, fine-grained security model..."
[ A cynic might point to the steady stream of NT bugs and security alerts and respond by saying "Well, Linux may not have been designed from the ground up to support those things, but NT doesn't appear to have been designed from the ground up to support things like, say, reliability, security, fault tolerance, or remote administration. Not that those things matter much when you have 'asynchronous I/O' woohoo!" ]
"For e-commerce workloads using secure sockets (SSL), recent PC Magazine tests showed Windows NT 4.0 with Internet Information Server 4.0 delivers approximately five times the performance provided by Linux and Stronghold."
[ LOL!! Whoever wrote this article apparently doesn't know about: "IIS Causes Memory Leak When Using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)" http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q 192/2/95.ASP ]
"It's interesting to note that there is not a single TPC result on any database running on Linux, and therefore Linux has yet to demonstrate their capabilities as a database server."
[ This is a good point, but worded in truly irritating newsgroup trolling fashion. ]
"These architecture constraints limit the ability of Linux to scale well past two processors."
[ This may be true, but I haven't heard about any noteworthy NT SMP installations lately either. And you can bet that Linux will rapidly and competently address any such weaknesses if there is a demand for it, something that I think cannot be said for NT. Service pack 7, anyone? ^_^ ]
"Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, First Union Capital Markets, Nasdaq and many others run mission critical applications on Windows NT 4.0."
[ What Microsoft conveniently fails to mention here is that all of those customers developed and maintain their NT apps with the help of a LEGION of FREE Microsoft consultoid help. I have reliable testimony that this is a FACT in at least one of these cases, and knowing MS, I'd wager it's true in ALL of them. It makes business sense -- MS needs customers to prove their platform and make statements just like the one above, so they'd be willing to pay to make it happen. ]
"There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees for Linux, unlike Windows NT where Compaq, Data General, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Unisys provide 99.9 percent system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers."
[ As someone once pointed out on a builder.com thread, 99.9% uptime sounds impressive until you actually calculate what it really means in hours of downtime. There are 8760 hours in a year. 0.1% of that is 8.76 hours. So let's turn that statement around to say that Compaq, Data General, HP, IBM, and Unisys provide 9 HOURS OF DOWNTIME PER YEAR GUARANTEES FOR WINDOWS NT BASED SERVERS. ^_^ Yes I know that statement is logically faulty but it sounds funny, and you get the message. ]
"It's important to understand that licensing cost is only a small part of the overall decision-making process for customers."
[ Duh! ]
"Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium."
[ Um, priced at a premium to WHAT? To NT support services?? As if those legions of freshly minted burger-flippers-turned-MCSE's actually know their way around a mission critical high performance server because they passed some standardized test?
Having seen some of the MS certification tests, I can personally vouch for the fact that these tests are actually quite stiff. But anecdotal evidence from friends who have gotten certification indicates that a lot of these new support staff have very shallow computing experience (after all how many GENUINE experts are there REALLY? I don't consider myself an expert in critical-server support, after 5 years.) ]
"For example how many certified engineers are there for Linux? How easy is it to find skilled development and support people for Linux?"
[ About as hard as it is to find skilled dev/support for any other platform - nearly impossible. ^_^ As for certified engineers - see my comment above. ]
"Linux uses the same security model as the original UNIX implementations- a model that was not designed from the ground up to be secure."
[ I'm not very knowledgeable about security so I'll defer rebuttal of this piece of FUD to an expert. ^_^ ]
"Linux as a desktop operating system makes no sense. A user would end up with a system that has fewer applications, is more complex to use and manage, and is less intuitive."
[ Today, I agree with this totally. ]
"Linux clearly has a long way to go to be competitive with Windows NT 4.0."
[ HOOWAH.... ! One word: "instant-loss-of-credibility-for-this-article-assu ming-it-had-any-to-being-with-which-it-d idnt" ]
I have to confess that the first time I even heard about the MacMillan package was when I was researching the product line at beyond.com.
In the OS section they had "MacMillan Complete Linux" or something like that.. and I thought to myself, isn't MacMillan in the BOOK business? What are they doing selling Linux? And -- why isn't beyond.com selling RED HAT?
It wasn't until a few days later that one of my more clueful buddies informed me that it was a boxed up Mandrake.
I checked again after I read this article and discovered that beyond.com is selling a MacMillan "Complete Redhat Linux v5.2 OS Del Secure Server" -- whatever THAT is. I could be wrong but it seems to be several releases behind... with the additional irony of the recent/. discussion about the zdnet secure server trials and the patches needed for Red Hat, here's MacMillan selling what appears to be an out of date version billed as a "secure server." Interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
the accurate and unbiased spread of news and information will be interrupted.
Hehehe. That one made me laugh. It was delivered so deadpan. ^_^
That was a GREAT story. You can be sure I'll be relating your parable around many company campfires in the next few weeks to a lot of Suits that THINK they know open source but don't know jackware from slackware. Unfortunately I have to deal with them all the time .. but stories like yours really nail a point.
Thanks!
at least $1 is donated to the FSF for every sold package.
When you're examining the apportioning of the pie, look at how much the other parties are getting as well as how much the FSF is getting. I think you'll find that $1 is not that big of a share.
This is super cool, I think, and I probably have to buy one just because it is so cool.
Sorry to sound cynical, but this just means you've been suckered by their publicity ploy.
I think, this finally proves that - as far as this is possible for a company - RedHat cares about the community.
People need to realize that Red Hat is now a PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANY. This means all of the normal PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANY APPURTENANCES, such as a Board of Directors, SEC filings, PR departments, marketing consultants, branding consultants, market research managers and liasons, and many, many other gears of the corporate machine. It is now a very naive belief to feel that Red Hat, as a corporation, "cares" about anything or anyone other than the value of their stock. In fact, it is now the legal and moral obligation of all officers of Red Hat to do everything in their power to maximize that value.
It is truly a mistake in perception to attribute human behavioural characteristics such as "caring" to a corporate machine. A group of people in an organization with a purpose will behave differently than any individual. My favorite example of this is two forces of civil war soldiers charging each other. No sane individual would contemplate running at a group of armed enemy soldiers who are hell bent on shooting you. But as a group, you are under an extremely complex set of psychological motives, manipulations, and pressures, and it is historical fact many soldiers died in exactly such circumstances.
Now, there may very well be INDIVIDUALS at Red Hat who "care about the community." I believe this is true. But rest assured that every action taken by the CORPORATION is carefully weighed and executed based on its short and long run potential impact on that all-powerful share price, and you should keep this in mind as you evaluate a company's behaviour. Remember that shareholders are more than ready to BRING SUIT against officers of a public company who engage in actions motivated by objectives other than that share price that seem to hurt the company.
Judging by the reactions here, it was a good move for Red Hat though.
You were warned. ^_^
Imagine if your San Francisco-to-Las Vegas plane crashes somewhere in the Sierra Nevadas in the middle of winter, you could become a hero by starting a fire with shavings from your notebook casing!
The overwhelming majority of those SUV owners never actually engage the Sport-Utility part of their Sport-Utility Vehicle i.e. these wimps never take their trucks OFF ROAD! And in fact you look at SUVs like the Lexus RX300 (adapted from the Toyota Camry of all things!) and you realize that SUVs are getting less Sportier and more Utilitier.
Personally, I think they sell so well simply because they are as functional as a station wagon for a family, but without the wussy-stigma. ^_^
So we may see a parallel in notebooks: the ruggedized rigs are the Manly Machines. You wouldn't want to be caught on a plane with the station wagon of computers now, would you?
NOTE: this turned into a GIGANTIC post, but I strike a blow for Penguin at the end, so hang in there! ^_^
* * *
First, pricing is a result of supply and demand forces. This is axiomatic. Thus when I observe some kind of systematic trend in prices, I infer that there are systematic changes taking place in demand, supply, or both.
On the supply side, we have Moore's law and it's cousins perpetually at work bringing down the cost-per-unit of processing power, storage, bandwidth, and every other dimension of computing. There are some irregularities to this which I'll address later but fundamentally, the past 20 years have been characterized by remarkably steady progress on the supply side.
If you accept this, then the relative stability of the average selling price of a PC between its advent in the early 80s up until roughly 1995 meant that there must have been concurrent, offsetting changes on the demand side stimulating demand for the constantly increasing supply of computing-units.
We even have a name for these demand-side stimulants. We call them Killer Apps. I my opinion, these Killer Apps are so significant to the history of the PC that one can even slice that history into phases characterized by the Killer App of the day.
I. Early DOS Era (1981 - 1984)
II. Late DOS, early GUI and Graphics Era (1984 - 1989) III. Late GUI and LAN Era (1990 - 1993) IV. The 32-bit Era (1994 - Present) V. Today: The Internet Era (1996 - Present) So -- are you still with me? Amazing! ^_^The way I concluded this article two years ago was to predict a recession in the PC industry unless a new Killer App emerged. Well, I was WRONG. No new killer app surfaced, but the PC industry has been booming.
Why is this? I believe it's because although the demand level for stuffing a ton of power and storage into a single box has plateaued, the demand for the number of boxes has continued to climb, as legions of new, first-time buyers, attracted by the "network effect" enter the market. Geoffrey Moore would describe them as "Late Majority."
Supposing that this continues for a while, and average unit selling prices of PCs continue to decline, I see a couple of interesting consequences of this. The first has to do with Milton Friedman's theory of component elasticity. This theory is very simple so don't worry if you didn't make it through Econ 180. The relevant part of it states that those parts of the whole product which are a big chunk of the cost of that product will be most sensitive to changes in the market for that product. Here's how it's relevant to the PC situation. Back when the average PC cost $2000, a $100 license for the OS was only 5% of the total. So nobody worried too much about the price of the OS.
HOWEVER -- for a PC that costs $400, the OS is now the BIGGEST COMPONENT COST. Vendors have a tremendous incentive to try and reduce that cost ... and guess what they're all thinking about right now?
LINUX.
I just now happened to be engaged in my semi-annual receive-ye-wisdom-from-the-Master-Alan-Cooper ritual. This ritual involves critically examining my most recent 6-month interval of design experience in relation to his book on design: About Face: The Essentials of UI Design.
First, a comment about the term "intuitiveness." AC discusses this term at some length and makes points about it that I agree with strongly.
A few choice excerpts starting from p. 57:
I often see people in our industry confuse the terms "ease-of-use," "intuitiveness," and "instinctiveness." The last Marketing VP I worked with was fond of saying that the nipple is most intuitive interface there is. This is just flat out WRONG. The nipple is an instinctive interface -- we're born with the knowledge of how to use it. Well, some of us anyway.
Intuition, on the other hand, is a non-rational, often non-conscious process of transferring other, learned knowledge to a new set of circumstances. Definitely not true of a nipple.
Now that I've beat the "intuitive" issue into a bloody pulp, I can address David's conclusion. He said:
I respectfully disagree with the first premise. I don't think the typical programmer gives much thought to the interface or interaction elements of their work at all. How many developers do you know who give thought whatsoever to concepts like "affordances," "visual fugue," or "visual motif?" Primitives vs. idioms? Restricting the interaction space?AC has a superbly articulated explanation for this.
(Emphasis added)I'll add a comment to this. Many engineers fall victim to this technology paradigm, but many engineers are also (justly) proud of their efficient/clean/structured/extensible/blazingly fast design of the ENGINE. Perhaps they unconsciously resist anything that hides, conceals, or otherwise covers the beauty of their design.
Well the fact of the matter is, very few people examine the engine or transmission or suspension when buying or driving a car. In fact few people even care. Drivers are typically interested in getting where they want to go in reasonable comfort without mechanical malfunctions, running out of fuel, or having to understand the disc-brake mechanism. That's why the DESIGNERS of cars are different people than the ENGINEERS .. perhaps our industry too will someday embrace this distinction. Until then, we engineers have sole responsibility for the utility of our creations. We still mostly have to wear the interaction-designer-hat and should take the time to learn from people who spend time really thinking about these problems, like AC, and iarchitect.com.
Thanks - I stand corrected!
^_^
Um. Say what?
If anybody did the inventing, it was Xerox PARC inventing the GUI with the GEM desktop. I used GEM way back when with apps like Ventura Publisher .. and the sad thing is, Windows has not really articulated the fundamental value of the GUI much more than GEM did.
More accurately (in my memory) the Lisa and the Mac advanced the GUI a step beyond GEM, but Windows never moved it much beyond that -- at least from an interface standpoint.
I had to take issue with that statement by Schmidt!
My first thought was that this claim, on the surface, seems to be an argument against vertically distributing your enterprise.
But on rethinking it, I recognized that a specific statement is being made here -- the value of controlling your information infrastructure. In a world where the variables defining the digital universe are constantly in flux, it helps have permanent core crew members who are in touch with them.
The truth is, you need to have a stable of technologists around -- not just to run your systems but also to help you figure out which strategies to pursue, which innovations to invest in, and which partnerships to form.
I have only found this to be true when two conditions are satisfied:
a) These technologists must have a grasp of the larger strategic business picture - they should understand concepts such as the technology adoption life cycle, Ronald Coase's theory of transaction costs, the theory of "network externalities" (whether you subscribe to it or not) and other realms typically outside off the scope of your average geek.
b) If (a) is true, management must also commit in a powerful way to trusting and embracing the input from these "renaissance geeks". In fact, such geeks should be a part of the core management team, perhaps not necessarily at a president/ceo level, but at least at a CIO/CTO level.
I've seen cases -- large companies in PARTICULAR -- where the CIO/CTO did NOT come from a technology background! These people, while hard working, smart, and enthusiastic about learning, simply don't have the gut level immersion in technology that I believe it takes to have a chance at really understanding it.
It's a fact of life: If the technologists in your company invent something ahead of everybody else, then all of a sudden your business will get bigger.
Again, only subject to condition (b) above. I'm sure that we've all had personal experience with companies within which some innovative group devised a genuinely creative and powerful concept, only to be squashed by the skepticism and lack of support from non-geek brass.
I can see how this perspective arises from the fact of Eric Schmidt being something of a geek himself.
Perhaps the last commandment missing from this article should be:
"BE a geek."
I have an idea -- maybe Larry was secretly on the side of the fat clients all along, and the whole thing was a ploy to buy time for software vendors. After all, Oracle is a software vendor. The plan was for him to loudly and vocally proclaim himself an advocate of NC (which he did), and then to marshal the resources of the NC backers to his banner (which he did) and then to cause said resources to flounder badly (guilty) thus giving the incumbents YEARS to address the shortcomings in their offerings revealed by the NC concept. ^_^
Readers of Ayn Rand will know what I'm talking about.
...'"
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that an overworked, underpaid, and probably not all that bright reporter merely parrots things he/she is told.
"This cheap technology could be built into consumer items such as milk cartons that scroll through pictures of missing children, or one-sheet newspapers with a button to toggle through the pages."
This is silly. This ranks right up there with Div-X and Interactive TV. Sometimes you can look at an idea and say "DUMB. SHEER DUMBNESS" without being required to back up your opinion with analysis and evidence.
However this IS a COOL TECHNOLOGY, with MAJOR potential. In my humble opinion. ^_^
The display is always an integral part of the man-machine interface. Tools like the PalmPilot, your cellular phone, your wristwatch, your car's dashboard, these can potentiall benefit from a technology like this. Reduced cost, reduced weight, visible in daylight, and other advantages seem possible with this technology.
"Organic and inorganic chemistries are so dissimilar that college courses almost always separate them into two tracks."
You know, I've always thought the rigid separation of education into discrete hegemonies "Economics" "Math" "Physics" "Basketweaving" destroys a lot of good interdisciplinary idea-generating potential. Other schools may be different, but where I went to school they paid lots of lip service to the concept of interdisciplinary programs but in practice it was tough and fraught with rules/policy barriers.
"For engineers it is enough that applications work, but Clancy's team plans to explain why."
I found that kind of a revealing comment, and funny for some reason. ^_^
" 'The theories say it should not work, so we are going to take a close look to find out what is really happening,' said Thompson."
Hehe this reminds me of a quote I once heard. "Most major discoveries are not preceded by a cry of 'Eureka!' -- rather, they are typically preceded by a 'That's funny
I use MS products. VoteZone runs on SQL Server + NT + IIS. So I hope my critique of this "article" carries a little weight. ^_^
"Linux fundamentally relies on 30-year-old operating system technology and architecture."
[ This statement is obviously intended to make the reader think that Linux is somehow decrepit, obsolete, old and crusty. Well, when you "take a step back" as they say themselves, and realize that Windows NT -- the "new" technology and architecture -- has major shortcomings and reliability issues, you may think to yourself, hey maybe there are some ADVANTAGES to "relying on a 30-year old technology." ]
"Linux was not designed from the ground-up to support symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP), graphical user interfaces (GUI), asynchronous I/O, fine-grained security model ..."
[ A cynic might point to the steady stream of NT bugs and security alerts and respond by saying "Well, Linux may not have been designed from the ground up to support those things, but NT doesn't appear to have been designed from the ground up to support things like, say, reliability, security, fault tolerance, or remote administration. Not that those things matter much when you have 'asynchronous I/O' woohoo!" ]
"For e-commerce workloads using secure sockets (SSL), recent PC Magazine tests showed Windows NT 4.0 with Internet Information Server 4.0 delivers approximately five times the performance provided by Linux and Stronghold."
[ LOL!! Whoever wrote this article apparently doesn't know about: "IIS Causes Memory Leak When Using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)" http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q 192/2/95.ASP ]
"It's interesting to note that there is not a single TPC result on any database running on Linux, and therefore Linux has yet to demonstrate their capabilities as a database server."
[ This is a good point, but worded in truly irritating newsgroup trolling fashion. ]
"These architecture constraints limit the ability of Linux to scale well past two processors."
[ This may be true, but I haven't heard about any noteworthy NT SMP installations lately either. And you can bet that Linux will rapidly and competently address any such weaknesses if there is a demand for it, something that I think cannot be said for NT. Service pack 7, anyone? ^_^ ]
"Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 has been proven in demanding customer environments to be a reliable operating system. Customers such as Barnes and Noble, The Boeing Company, Chicago Stock Exchange, Dell Computer, First Union Capital Markets, Nasdaq and many others run mission critical applications on Windows NT 4.0."
[ What Microsoft conveniently fails to mention here is that all of those customers developed and maintain their NT apps with the help of a LEGION of FREE Microsoft consultoid help. I have reliable testimony that this is a FACT in at least one of these cases, and knowing MS, I'd wager it's true in ALL of them. It makes business sense -- MS needs customers to prove their platform and make statements just like the one above, so they'd be willing to pay to make it happen. ]
"There are no OEMs that provide uptime guarantees for Linux, unlike Windows NT where Compaq, Data General, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Unisys provide 99.9 percent system-level uptime guarantees for Windows NT-based servers."
[ As someone once pointed out on a builder.com thread, 99.9% uptime sounds impressive until you actually calculate what it really means in hours of downtime. There are 8760 hours in a year. 0.1% of that is 8.76 hours. So let's turn that statement around to say that Compaq, Data General, HP, IBM, and Unisys provide 9 HOURS OF DOWNTIME PER YEAR GUARANTEES FOR WINDOWS NT BASED SERVERS. ^_^ Yes I know that statement is logically faulty but it sounds funny, and you get the message. ]
"It's important to understand that licensing cost is only a small part of the overall decision-making process for customers."
[ Duh! ]
"Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium."
[ Um, priced at a premium to WHAT? To NT support services?? As if those legions of freshly minted burger-flippers-turned-MCSE's actually know their way around a mission critical high performance server because they passed some standardized test?
Having seen some of the MS certification tests, I can personally vouch for the fact that these tests are actually quite stiff. But anecdotal evidence from friends who have gotten certification indicates that a lot of these new support staff have very shallow computing experience (after all how many GENUINE experts are there REALLY? I don't consider myself an expert in critical-server support, after 5 years.) ]
"For example how many certified engineers are there for Linux? How easy is it to find skilled development and support people for Linux?"
[ About as hard as it is to find skilled dev/support for any other platform - nearly impossible. ^_^ As for certified engineers - see my comment above. ]
"Linux uses the same security model as the original UNIX implementations- a model that was not designed from the ground up to be secure."
[ I'm not very knowledgeable about security so I'll defer rebuttal of this piece of FUD to an expert. ^_^ ]
"Linux as a desktop operating system makes no sense. A user would end up with a system that has fewer applications, is more complex to use and manage, and is less intuitive."
[ Today, I agree with this totally. ]
"Linux clearly has a long way to go to be competitive with Windows NT 4.0."
[ HOOWAH .... ! One word: "instant-loss-of-credibility-for-this-article-assu ming-it-had-any-to-being-with-which-it-d idnt" ]
In the OS section they had "MacMillan Complete Linux" or something like that .. and I thought to myself, isn't MacMillan in the BOOK business? What are they doing selling Linux? And -- why isn't beyond.com selling RED HAT?
It wasn't until a few days later that one of my more clueful buddies informed me that it was a boxed up Mandrake.
I checked again after I read this article and discovered that beyond.com is selling a MacMillan "Complete Redhat Linux v5.2 OS Del Secure Server" -- whatever THAT is. I could be wrong but it seems to be several releases behind ... with the additional irony of the recent /. discussion about the zdnet secure server trials and the patches needed for Red Hat, here's MacMillan selling what appears to be an out of date version billed as a "secure server." Interesting.