RE: Offtopic, inappropriate jokes?

[Scott Stone <SStone@example.com>]

which brings us back to the point that nobody has designed a product to
compete with Microsoft yet that can compete in Microsoft's core market.  Any
OS that wants to do that has to be:

1) transparent to the user as far as the technical details are concerned
(yeah, when Windows blows up it's a mega-PITA to fix it, but when it works,
it works and the user doesn't need to know or care how)

2) able to run all the 3rd party stuff at native-level speed.  ie, I pop in
my Space Ostrich 3D cdrom and it's gotta run as well as it would do under
Windows.

how to arrive at this is not an easy question or an easy task, though.
Which seems to be why the Linux/BSD people are working more towards, in my
view, competing in the Server arena - but there you have Big UNIX to contend
with as well (Sun and HP mostly).  That said, I think it'll be much easier
to position an open-source alternative to Win2k/backoffice than it would be
to position an open-source alternative to Win98/WinME for home use... but
the home use is a much bigger market in terms of copies sold per year.  so
in terms of installed base, Microsoft will still stay on top, at least in
the near term.

-----------------------------------------------------
Scott M. Stone <sstone@example.com>
Senior Technical Consultant - UNIX and Networking
Taos, the Sysadmin Company - Santa Clara, CA


-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Cozens [mailto:simon@example.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 09, 2001 3:03 AM
To: tlug@example.com
Subject: Re: Offtopic, inappropriate jokes?


On Sat, Jun 09, 2001 at 12:02:43PM +0900, Frank BENNETT (フランク　ベネット
) wrote:
> Now suppose that Marie Callendar's has the good luck one day to see
> all the other sweets peddlers wiped out (because some sympathetic
> legislator makes their operations illegal, say, or because it suddenly
> and inexplicably becomes physically dangerous to compete in this line
> of business).
 
So anti-trust laws are to protect against clueless legislators?

> They could cut corners in other ways instead -- by substituting raw
> cane sugar for pies, or by closing a bunch of their stores, or by
> taking less care to keep insects and bits of dirt out of their pie
> fillings. But the idea is that they don't have to work so hard to do
> just as well for themselves as they did before.

But there's got to be a point at which it becomes feasible for someone
to start a new pie franchise undercutting them. In the case of software,
this happens when the non-existant Linux, Inc. produces an equivalent or
better product for $0. Then those who want cheap pie or OS can have it;
moreover, the monopoly would have created the demand for cheap pies, so
it's natural for someone to come along and fill it. It doesn't seem right
to start with free market capitalism, but follow it up with 'so long as
you don't do too well.' I suppose there are areas where it is impossible to
compete, such as the case of the phone company who owns all the cable (ooh,
look, threads merging) but those cases are usually state-sponsored
monopolies
in the first case.

-- 
        buf[hdr[0]] = 0;        /* unbelievably lazy ken (twit) */  - Andrew
Hume

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