Showing posts with label obsolescence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label obsolescence. Show all posts
4 Nov 2009
25 Sept 2008
Not one god-damned red cent for Wall Street
I'm just as deep in the stock market as anyone else is these days. After all, government policy has been urging employers to gut pension plans (remember guaranteed retirement benefits?) in favour of investment plans (with only a set contribution, but no guaranteed returns). So most of my retirement savings is tied up in the stock market, which is a risky gamble. I could lose it, but I wanted the big payoffs that stocks might provide, so I took a chance.
That's how the free market is supposed to work, right? Isn't that what Nobel-prize winner Milton Friedman said? Isn't that the ideology which has been ascendant in the US for the past twenty-eight years? If the banking industry isn't working miracles with all of those fantastic new financial instruments they've cooked up, and are in fact just building an elaborate confection that is collapsing on itself, why should we prop it up? It sounds like a huge proportion of the finance industry is doing things of no real economic value. They need a huge handout (plenty of which they'll pass back as "campaign contributions"), and if we give it they'll demand another huge handout in a year after they waste this one.
So fine, let my portfolio lose seventy-five percent of its value. Even ninety-five percent – we'll work it out. I'd rather spend a trillion dollars helping people in need than wasting it on more empty suits. Recessions are necessary: endlessly trying to apply the juice to extend a boom just makes the crash that much harder, and that's what we're seeing now. So let it go, and then we'll work out a more relevant (and possibly even less corrupt) financial system.
Bush said today the sky is falling so we've got to unlock the US Treasury with no questions asked and no accountability. He's the same guy that wanted to gut Social Security and put it all in the stock market! (Wow, too bad we didn't get to experience all of that great growth, huh?) First, we had to surrender all of our civil liberties because the terrorists were going to kill us all with box cutters. Second, we had to invade another country because they were going to nuke our balls. Now we're supposed to give an enormous birthday present to Wall Street because they blew our money on bear whores and cocaine. The man has no credibility. Fool me thrice: go fuck yourself.
Giving a huge payoff to this gang of crooks won't do a damned bit of good; it just encourages them to do it again. Write your senators and representative and tell them no. Maybe some regulation is in order. Maybe the banks need to be nationalized. Maybe mortgages need to be refinanced en masse. Maybe some depositors are going to lose their money (me included). So be it: when there is hell to pay, I'll pay it, but I won't pay one god-damned red cent in protection money.
That's how the free market is supposed to work, right? Isn't that what Nobel-prize winner Milton Friedman said? Isn't that the ideology which has been ascendant in the US for the past twenty-eight years? If the banking industry isn't working miracles with all of those fantastic new financial instruments they've cooked up, and are in fact just building an elaborate confection that is collapsing on itself, why should we prop it up? It sounds like a huge proportion of the finance industry is doing things of no real economic value. They need a huge handout (plenty of which they'll pass back as "campaign contributions"), and if we give it they'll demand another huge handout in a year after they waste this one.So fine, let my portfolio lose seventy-five percent of its value. Even ninety-five percent – we'll work it out. I'd rather spend a trillion dollars helping people in need than wasting it on more empty suits. Recessions are necessary: endlessly trying to apply the juice to extend a boom just makes the crash that much harder, and that's what we're seeing now. So let it go, and then we'll work out a more relevant (and possibly even less corrupt) financial system.
Bush said today the sky is falling so we've got to unlock the US Treasury with no questions asked and no accountability. He's the same guy that wanted to gut Social Security and put it all in the stock market! (Wow, too bad we didn't get to experience all of that great growth, huh?) First, we had to surrender all of our civil liberties because the terrorists were going to kill us all with box cutters. Second, we had to invade another country because they were going to nuke our balls. Now we're supposed to give an enormous birthday present to Wall Street because they blew our money on bear whores and cocaine. The man has no credibility. Fool me thrice: go fuck yourself.
Giving a huge payoff to this gang of crooks won't do a damned bit of good; it just encourages them to do it again. Write your senators and representative and tell them no. Maybe some regulation is in order. Maybe the banks need to be nationalized. Maybe mortgages need to be refinanced en masse. Maybe some depositors are going to lose their money (me included). So be it: when there is hell to pay, I'll pay it, but I won't pay one god-damned red cent in protection money.
4 May 2008
Yahoo! Microsoft is dead.
It is with a six-pack of schadenfreude that I consider the collapse of Microsoft's attempt to eat Yahoo. Particularly hilarious is this zinger from Steve Ballmer:
The yellow press is full of speculation that Ballmer's job is on the line. As a replacement, let me be the first to recommend former SCO head Daryl McBride. He has lots of experience that will help in Microsoft's probable new line of business: threatening people with lawsuits. The RIAA route is the last avenue of the irrelevant.
At the heart of our strategy is a commitment to bring the benefits of competition, choice, and innovation to everyone who uses the Internet.Competition? from a convicted monopolist? Hollow laugh. Choice? Only until they use cross-subsidy to wipe out their competitors. Innovation? Microsoft has never had an original idea other than Microsoft Bob.
The yellow press is full of speculation that Ballmer's job is on the line. As a replacement, let me be the first to recommend former SCO head Daryl McBride. He has lots of experience that will help in Microsoft's probable new line of business: threatening people with lawsuits. The RIAA route is the last avenue of the irrelevant.
19 Nov 2007
Feeling bloated
Do you feel like you're slowing down as you get older? Maybe it isn't just your own metabolism – it could be the software you're using. An excellent comparison of resource consumption by Windows/Office over the past decade is a damning indictment of the horribly bloated and unwieldy state of the Microsoft desktop platform. The old adage that "Andy [Grove (Intel)] giveth, Bill [Gates (Microsoft)] taketh away" turns out to have been insufficiently pessimistic: Bill has been taking more than Andy had to give. The free lunch is over, but some companies are still bellied up to the buffet.
23 May 2007
Nortel's continued sad decline
Once-proud Nortel is back in the news, this time with a funny story about how they have a hard time keeping their former subsidiaries as customers. This is especially funny since Nortel's big successes in the go-go 90s were selling switches to Baby Bells who defected from Western Electric when they needed more switches.
For a while there it seemed like half the people I knew went to work at BNR/Northern Telecom/Nortel, and then just as quickly, none of them worked there anymore. The telecom boom died, and everybody had more than enough expensive circuit-switched almost-obsolete equipment depreciating noisily in their expensively airconditioned telecom equipment rooms – around the same time that people really started using blackberry and VOIP in a serious way. The Bay Networks acquisition never fared well against Cisco. Nortel never managed to come out with anything that resonated in the marketplace again, and their financials reflect that.
The telecom industry has become very rapidly commodified, and Nortel's half-cousin and arch-enemy Avaya has become the standard for awful, expensive local PBX solutions, while Asterisk-based solutions are ruining the party for all of the lumbering giants. Nortel could have ridden the wave of open source to become a new low-price leader, but instead seems intent on circling the wagons and riding its customer base down the drain.
And back to the earliest item: they apparently don't have any competent public relations staff. That's pathetic.
For a while there it seemed like half the people I knew went to work at BNR/Northern Telecom/Nortel, and then just as quickly, none of them worked there anymore. The telecom boom died, and everybody had more than enough expensive circuit-switched almost-obsolete equipment depreciating noisily in their expensively airconditioned telecom equipment rooms – around the same time that people really started using blackberry and VOIP in a serious way. The Bay Networks acquisition never fared well against Cisco. Nortel never managed to come out with anything that resonated in the marketplace again, and their financials reflect that.
The telecom industry has become very rapidly commodified, and Nortel's half-cousin and arch-enemy Avaya has become the standard for awful, expensive local PBX solutions, while Asterisk-based solutions are ruining the party for all of the lumbering giants. Nortel could have ridden the wave of open source to become a new low-price leader, but instead seems intent on circling the wagons and riding its customer base down the drain.
And back to the earliest item: they apparently don't have any competent public relations staff. That's pathetic.
12 Apr 2007
The jig is up.
The desktop era is over, just as the DOS era ended when Windows 3.1 came out fifteen years ago. Suddenly the Windows monopoly is irrelevant. Nobody targets Windows, they target the web, and they probably target Mac as well if there's some software they have to install. Windows (and Office) are not being pushed aside primarily by Mac and Linux; no, that is a symptom. Instead Windows has been made irrelevant by web-based email and a cloud of little productivity tools that are now available (and growing fast). It's April on the web, December on the desktop. There's no reason to put up with tired Windows with the high cost and terrible quality (usability, speed, security – name your criteria) because you can get a Mac or install Linux and get all of the productivity tools you need – on the network, to which everybody has access everyplace they want to work. The days of emailing Word documents around to attempt to collaborate are over. The way that people work is changing, and today's desktop software gets in the way of collaboration. In two years nobody will be bothering with it anymore. And don't even get me started on Sharepoint and the rest of Microsoft's collaboration "tools" that they're tacking on to the outside of their old, brittle applications. The new services are organized around collaboration and can do much, much more of what people actually need to do. Game over.
Yes, Windows will still be around, as will Office. Today's 30+ population will continue to use it, and they might even upgrade one more time before they get pressured into switching platforms too. They'll get tired of sitting in support queues trying to install these packages on Windows, and at the same time be attracted by friends to services that have no such problems (and, usually free of charge, and carry no expectation of hand-holding telephone support). MS is defanged: they have to compete with Linux (free) and Mac (qualitatively better) to provide a stable, simple operating system that gets people online and lets them get their work done. Except Microsoft probably can't do that with Windows and maintain backwards compatibility. They are stuck.
Developers who are hooked on Microsoft tools will continue to maintain a wilting set of applications in a deteriorating Windows market. They'll try to use the Microsoft stack to build web services, but the licensing costs will squeeze them right out of business. Microsoft development tools are very sleek, very sexy: they are space shuttles built for architecture astronauts, when what most people need is a bus or a Hyundai (or if they're super rich/irresponsible, a Hummer) to get them to the office. You can't build a web-scalable application with that swollen, sluggish .NET framework for any money. (If so, name one. It's hard enough to find a really big site that runs Java.) Yes, these tools are a very satisfying environment to code in, and they debug like a dream, but they're built for desktop software (at most, client-server) and that game is played out.
So, how am I not full of it? I'll give you three real-world examples.
First, my own case. Plain fact is, I can (and do) virtually all of my real work without using any desktop software other than the browser. I use Ubuntu Linux. I run Firefox, IM and Skype regularly, and that's about it. Maybe P2P software, and video players (which are all available cross-platform). Sometimes I use OpenOffice.org when I have to look at Office documents. In very rare cases, I have to pop open a windows virtual machine. There's nothing to keep me from using Linux or Mac, so I use Linux because I'm a crazy open-source pinko commie (what else is new). But what's scary for Microsoft is, I really can do all I need to do with free software.
Second, Adolfo. His laptop got old (battery, mouse, screen dying) and he needed a new one. I suggested a Mac, but he is familiar with Windows and wanted to stick with it. At the same time, his Windows XP install stopped booting (for the third time in 18 months) -- and while he shopped he still wanted to use his computer. I declined to spend the 36 hours (fact!) to reinstall and patch it, and instead installed, configured and patched Linux in 90 minutes (fact!). Adolfo didn't like Linux: he's not your early adopter to begin with (not thrilled with change) – and the software for IM he really didn't like. Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are much more sexy and feature-rich than Pidgin (f.k.a. GAIM), and even Skype is missing video conferencing in their Linux version. So he bought a new HP laptop with Vista on it. He didn't like that either: the change was too radical and not positive. It asks him a lot of questions he doesn't understand (that it gives no clue how to answer). It introduces installation hurdles to overcome the security holes inherent in the Windows architecture, not to mention the brick walls introduced by the antivirus software. The transparent windows make the interface cluttered and hard to use. There are too many options standing in the way of anything (insert a USB flash drive and just see how many decisions you now have to make. Oh, then try to eject it! That's great stuff.) He spent time with Windows Movie Maker, which has improved to the point where it doesn't crash every five minutes, but it was jerky, slow, and awkward. It has an Office 2007 trial installed, but he'd have to buy it all over again, and eventually he conceded that he really has no use for it. In the end, he said that next time he's going to get a Mac. The lesson here is that he has a painless choice.
Third, my Mom. She doesn't use any desktop productivity software, ever: she has stopped writing letters and no longer uses Word. She just uses web-based email and surfs the web, and sometimes uses IM (but not the advanced features). She doesn't know about configuration and doesn't want to pay just to keep her machine from stabbing her in the back. So why does she need Windows? She doesn't, and her next computer will probably be a Mac. Or it might be a Linux appliance that updates itself and requires no configuration, like Google is rumoured to be producing.
Nobody can say that this is pie-in-the-sky, Henny-Penny, pass-the-bong bullshit, not anymore. This is the actual state of affairs. Pundits agree. Wall Street agrees. Startups are all focused on web applications. The last new category of desktop applications, P2P, came out eight years ago. The reality is that the desktop is already irrelevant, therefore Microsoft is vulnerable, as the real battle is being joined elsewhere. Microsoft has everything to lose.
Now we look back at 1992 and say that was when the DOS era ended, and that's not controversial. It was very controversial in 1992 to people whose livelihoods depended on DOS applications, and denial is a powerful force. Today I got an email invitation for Excel training. Why not classes about shorthand and how to operate a Dictaphone? In three years that won't be a joke anymore.
Yes, Windows will still be around, as will Office. Today's 30+ population will continue to use it, and they might even upgrade one more time before they get pressured into switching platforms too. They'll get tired of sitting in support queues trying to install these packages on Windows, and at the same time be attracted by friends to services that have no such problems (and, usually free of charge, and carry no expectation of hand-holding telephone support). MS is defanged: they have to compete with Linux (free) and Mac (qualitatively better) to provide a stable, simple operating system that gets people online and lets them get their work done. Except Microsoft probably can't do that with Windows and maintain backwards compatibility. They are stuck.
Developers who are hooked on Microsoft tools will continue to maintain a wilting set of applications in a deteriorating Windows market. They'll try to use the Microsoft stack to build web services, but the licensing costs will squeeze them right out of business. Microsoft development tools are very sleek, very sexy: they are space shuttles built for architecture astronauts, when what most people need is a bus or a Hyundai (or if they're super rich/irresponsible, a Hummer) to get them to the office. You can't build a web-scalable application with that swollen, sluggish .NET framework for any money. (If so, name one. It's hard enough to find a really big site that runs Java.) Yes, these tools are a very satisfying environment to code in, and they debug like a dream, but they're built for desktop software (at most, client-server) and that game is played out.
So, how am I not full of it? I'll give you three real-world examples.
First, my own case. Plain fact is, I can (and do) virtually all of my real work without using any desktop software other than the browser. I use Ubuntu Linux. I run Firefox, IM and Skype regularly, and that's about it. Maybe P2P software, and video players (which are all available cross-platform). Sometimes I use OpenOffice.org when I have to look at Office documents. In very rare cases, I have to pop open a windows virtual machine. There's nothing to keep me from using Linux or Mac, so I use Linux because I'm a crazy open-source pinko commie (what else is new). But what's scary for Microsoft is, I really can do all I need to do with free software.
Second, Adolfo. His laptop got old (battery, mouse, screen dying) and he needed a new one. I suggested a Mac, but he is familiar with Windows and wanted to stick with it. At the same time, his Windows XP install stopped booting (for the third time in 18 months) -- and while he shopped he still wanted to use his computer. I declined to spend the 36 hours (fact!) to reinstall and patch it, and instead installed, configured and patched Linux in 90 minutes (fact!). Adolfo didn't like Linux: he's not your early adopter to begin with (not thrilled with change) – and the software for IM he really didn't like. Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are much more sexy and feature-rich than Pidgin (f.k.a. GAIM), and even Skype is missing video conferencing in their Linux version. So he bought a new HP laptop with Vista on it. He didn't like that either: the change was too radical and not positive. It asks him a lot of questions he doesn't understand (that it gives no clue how to answer). It introduces installation hurdles to overcome the security holes inherent in the Windows architecture, not to mention the brick walls introduced by the antivirus software. The transparent windows make the interface cluttered and hard to use. There are too many options standing in the way of anything (insert a USB flash drive and just see how many decisions you now have to make. Oh, then try to eject it! That's great stuff.) He spent time with Windows Movie Maker, which has improved to the point where it doesn't crash every five minutes, but it was jerky, slow, and awkward. It has an Office 2007 trial installed, but he'd have to buy it all over again, and eventually he conceded that he really has no use for it. In the end, he said that next time he's going to get a Mac. The lesson here is that he has a painless choice.
Third, my Mom. She doesn't use any desktop productivity software, ever: she has stopped writing letters and no longer uses Word. She just uses web-based email and surfs the web, and sometimes uses IM (but not the advanced features). She doesn't know about configuration and doesn't want to pay just to keep her machine from stabbing her in the back. So why does she need Windows? She doesn't, and her next computer will probably be a Mac. Or it might be a Linux appliance that updates itself and requires no configuration, like Google is rumoured to be producing.
Nobody can say that this is pie-in-the-sky, Henny-Penny, pass-the-bong bullshit, not anymore. This is the actual state of affairs. Pundits agree. Wall Street agrees. Startups are all focused on web applications. The last new category of desktop applications, P2P, came out eight years ago. The reality is that the desktop is already irrelevant, therefore Microsoft is vulnerable, as the real battle is being joined elsewhere. Microsoft has everything to lose.
Now we look back at 1992 and say that was when the DOS era ended, and that's not controversial. It was very controversial in 1992 to people whose livelihoods depended on DOS applications, and denial is a powerful force. Today I got an email invitation for Excel training. Why not classes about shorthand and how to operate a Dictaphone? In three years that won't be a joke anymore.
19 Jan 2007
Microsoft targeting its apps for Linux
Believe me, I'll be thrilled when Linux supplants Windows and conquers the desktop... but the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend. The open source commoditization beast ate the database market (digestion takes longer than peristalsis). It's chewing on the operating system.
Guess who's on the plate.
The good news is that the era of market-imposed artificial scarcity of software is coming to an end, and we'll all reap the benefits. The bad news is that Sage's license revenue will disappear along with it. I think that'll take a long time though.
Five years.
So yeah, I love open source and want Linux to win. Never mind that I'm a filthy communist, though - I still like a paycheck, and unless Sage learns to ride the wave and make open source part of its business (like MySQL did), we'll be in Pervasive's position before long.
As will Microsoft.
If you don't think this is cheerful, ask me sometime what I think about information ecology and first contact. When it comes to our relative prospects in a world dominated by open source, call me Pollyanna.
Guess who's on the plate.
The good news is that the era of market-imposed artificial scarcity of software is coming to an end, and we'll all reap the benefits. The bad news is that Sage's license revenue will disappear along with it. I think that'll take a long time though.
Five years.
So yeah, I love open source and want Linux to win. Never mind that I'm a filthy communist, though - I still like a paycheck, and unless Sage learns to ride the wave and make open source part of its business (like MySQL did), we'll be in Pervasive's position before long.
As will Microsoft.
If you don't think this is cheerful, ask me sometime what I think about information ecology and first contact. When it comes to our relative prospects in a world dominated by open source, call me Pollyanna.
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