[ale] OT: The Amazing WEB

William Wylde dbaron13 at atl.bellsouth.net
Wed Feb 20 00:53:49 EST 2002


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

On 2/19/02, 10:32:14 AM, "Matt Magee" <mattmagee.md at netzero.net> wrote
regarding Re: [ale] OT: The Amazing WEB:


> Nice to see that someone actually knows what anarchy is in theory.  Just
as
> the U.S.S.R. was not communist.

> I agree with your assesment of Linux on the desktop.  I also believe that
> until there is a "simpleton" version, Linux will not go mainstream.  Have
> you ever sampled BeOS?  I thought that was a step in the right direction,
> though they failed economically.

Be is a damn good OS, and in terms of ease of install/use (especially
auto hardware-detect and automagic handling of plug-n-pray) the only real
competetor I've seen for M$- I've got it installed on this box, as a
matter-of-fact.  Their mistake was taking on IBM  * and * micro$oft at
the same time- by buiding their strategy around a whole new architecture,
the BeBox, rather than focusing their efforts on making software and apps
which would run on an Intel box. I've never actually run a BeBox, but
reports I have of them seem to indicate they'll run rings around intel
boxes, but they were also more expensive than the average PC.  Add to
that cost the relative sparsity of apps/developers for the enviroment,
and you have a recipe for failure, no matter how much "better" your
product may actually be.

I personally think the only reason IBM was even able to catch up with
Apple in the PC market was because IBM's vast capital reserves drawn from
it's mainframe buisness, among other things, let it basically carry the
cost of R & D, marketing, etc. and offer a competitive price for it's
product in spite of these costs.

Linux is in a unique posistion- in that ALL of it's R & D and development
costs are written off, from the start.  So much so that it's cost is
FREE.  So a project like Linux is the only kind of project which COULD
compete with an established giant like Micro$oft OR Apple (in it's 
heyday).

I get tired of hearing folks bitch and whine about Micro$oft's
market-share, grumble about their buiness practices, and not address the
issues which gave it it's market-share in the first place- or, if they
do, dismiss the very idea of addressing these issues as being beneath
them and imply that the marketplace should rise to their level of
technical expertise rather than they lower themselves to creating an
interface for people who just want to click buttons and think as little
as possible about how the iformation they're accessing is being processed
and handled.

Linux can be the best of both worlds, and it will have to be in order to
seriously challenge Micro$oft marketshare.  To think any other way is to
stick your head in a hole, since we live in a world where most people
can't even program their VCR, much less a bash script.

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