Re: Debian: abandon ship?
On Fri, Jun 07, 2002 at 11:18:01AM -0500, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> Probably. More significant though, is marketing. Most of us here agree
> that Windows isn't the best OS around, but it's got the largest userbase
> because of marketing and because it's what comes preinstalled on most PCs.
"Marketing" here means a *lot*, doesn't it?
> Is it much of a stretch to assume that Red Hat is the most-used Linux
> distro because of marketing and being the most-often-preinstalled distro
> on PCs that come with Linux?
I'd like to say marketing shouldn't be seen as just "advertisement,
advocacy", and that sort of thing. Just a few comments about Windows and
Red Hat (and all other companies who manage to make money today).
***
See that I'm not a big fan of any of them. I'm just saying that
this is what they do to gain market share -- and it seems to work quite
well.
***
Windows may be not behave decently at all, but it sells as it is, and
it's not only marketing. I can see some of the reasons:
1 - They do invest in their product, but thy'll target the users and do
whatever they want.The UI, for example, that most hackers find terrible,
works well for most "clueless" users. Microsoft gives people what they
want, and will really not care about what people do not want. They
didn't have to worry about security until now, for example, because
their users did not complain about that (I know lots of banks that
absolutely trust Microsoft products).
They get statistics from their Help Desk, see what they may have
missed, ask users about their products, and then do what they want.
If you do what the user wants, you make it more likely that he'll
stick with your product.
Nothing new here -- just standard business procedure. They've just
been absolutely competent in that.
2 - Development tools. This is how they built the empire. Don't exepct
all developers to be brilliant. Build tools with graphical
interfaces and a lot of automated stuff. No complexity -- languages
like VB are just perfect for the person who just wants to see their
"Hello world" program working. They won't understand too much about
the underlying framework. These people will gradually move to making
useful programs (well, if pople use them they're useful) in VB (or
ASP, or wahtever).
The point is: if you target the *good* developer, you won't sell too
much. And if you don't sell a lot of compilers and devel tools, you
won't have a lot of applications written for your OS (who's going to
write the applications? You, alone?) Ironically, Microsoft has used
the "power of thousands of developers all over the world" to build
their Empire. Hm, suddenly "Open Source" comes to mind. Wow.
Subtle. Efficient. People usually don't see this, but it's an
absolutely important point. Let the clueless develop. They'll build
an empire for you.
Now... See that quality is not necessarily what people want. Maybe
ease-of-use is a priority to them.
That does not mean Microsoft isn't investing in quality. They need this
so they won't get lost in a bunch of crappy and unmaintainable code.
That's why they built NT -- which runs on a microkernel written by Dave
Cutler (this means a lot, trust me). The win32 system on top of it may
be crappy, but the kernel's gotten absolutely better. Did yo unotice
that from NT to XP, Windows got gradually more stable? My bet is:
they're gradually replacing crappy code with new code.
I'd guess that quite soon, "stability" will not be an advantage of BSD
or Linux over Windows.
Red Hat does something similar to #1. They are obviously better than
Microsoft, but still: they'll give what their users want. They'll give
them graphical config tools, for example. They may not need to give
their users "perfect" packages... Just goo denough so they won't
complain too much.
And one more thing they give to their users is a periodic release.
New software, new versions of software... A reason for people to
upgrade -- and also to be compatible with all their friends, who did
upgrade already.
You see... It all has to do with "quality x quantity". Want lots of
people to ue your product? Well, give up quality. Not pnly because you won't
"be able to ship quality products quick", but also because your users
may show you than they're not interested in your concept of quality.
What they call quality is "something that workd (most of the time) and
is easy to use, and has new things every now and they, so I can
satisfy that little impulse inside me that makes me look for new things".
I do believe, however, that it is possible to have something that does
have some quality, and that lots of people will use. I didn't see
MacOS/X, but it seems to be (although proprietary) something to look at.
Get something that has quality and make it interesting for people.
(Remember Corel, Stormix, etc?)
Just thought I'd share this with you guys. :-)
J.
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