[ale] OT: more info on where all the jobs are (going...)

[Greg]

Well, I dunno.  I have found one company more unrelenting or at least as
unrelenting in their search for profits than MS - Wal Mart.  Instead of
working on increasing their prices to get profits, Wal-Mart cuts costs.
Their $199 PC's and adoption of Lindows is a smack in the face to MS and
Bill cannot do a dammed thing but send his minions to grovel in one of the
buyer's rooms in Arkansas (decorated a la police interrogation room w/ Sam's
visage looking down on the proceedings).  OpenOffice has that xml mindset
you are talking about and seems to be on the right track.  The only question
is if Sun can survive long enough to keep their office product around (corp
types like the fact that a big co. is behind their software with support)
and maybe give Sun's office and OpenOffice.org a chance to crack the MS
Office monopoly.

I would be willing to simplify something for the home market.  I know
OpenBSD guys that have used isof to make machines that already have a nice X
based GUI, an email client, and anything else ready made for clients and
family members.  xfce and OSPueblo have made strides in this arena too.  But
using proprietary standards and universal-like technologies like xml are the
key.  You are dead on in that idea. Apple was successful in getting
universal standards on Macs because all developers had to use their tool kit
and standards and they owned the hardware - much like Sun and Solaris (but I
would run OpenBSD on Sun stuff nowadays).  This avoided the "Tower of Babel"
programs that the pc suffered from in the early days, that is somewhat cured
by the MS Foundation Class Library in Windows stuff.

But yeah, seems like a project waiting to happen.  Lindows & OSPueblo is a
start.  See http://www.ospueblo.com/ .  But Lindows seems too proprietary.

Greg

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ale-admin at ale.org [mailto:ale-admin at ale.org]On Behalf Of Joe
> Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 2:23 PM
> To: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] OT: more info on where all the jobs are (going...)
>
>
> "Greg" <runman at speedfactory.net> writes:
>
> [snip]
>
> > 	RPM dependencies, apt-get, ports, and packages still don't
> compare to just
> > hitting a button to update, inserting a CDROM, or having it done
> > automatically.  Red Hat's up2date is the answer.  Suse needs to
> make it a
> > single button and not require a menu hunt.  Wine/Win4Lin/VMWare
> need to be
> > done automatically and done flawlessly.  The question of "Can I run
> > Office/Foo on this ?" should be answered "of course".  A discussion of
> > anything else will just give a consumer a case of
> > glassy-eyed-my-head-hurts-please-stop-the-madness-of-tech-talk".  Unices
> > still are not ready for the casual user desktop until they fix this
> > problem - though one needs to keep in mind that the goal of
> some projects is
> > not the casual user desktop (plan9 and OpenBSD come to mind).
>
> And in fact, Open Source Unices are unlikely to ever be ready for the
> casual user, because the vast, vast majority of people who actually
> work on them are not all that interested in making every conceivable
> task trivial for the user. But usability is a big niche that for-profit
> corporations can invade - witness Lycoris, for example. That's
> a good thing, too, but they have their work cut out for them, because
> they have a huge array of different applications to support, and
> each of those apps pretty much does things its own way.
>
> Windows has an advantage in this regard due to its monoculturalism -
> *everything* that runs on Windows "has to" follow M$'s UI and
> interoperability guidelines and APIs. (Though I, personally, try to
> give all the Windows software I write cryptic and confusing UIs
> whenever possible :-)
>
> I think the single biggest step the open-source community could take
> to narrow that gap would be to develop a comprehensive set of open
> *application-level* interoperability standards - eg, XML DTDs for
> word-processor documents, spreadsheets, and so forth - that support all
> the features M$ touts in their own products. But the nature of the
> open-source community makes such a development unlikely, I think.  It
> would be a chore, and people have more interesting prey to track down
> and kill.
>
> Cheers,
>
> --Joe Knapka
> _______________________________________________
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> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>

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