Re: T1 or fractional T1 vendors in MA?

["Jerry Feldman-2" <user=4@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:54:00 -0400 
David Rosenstrauch <[hidden email]> wrote: 

> [hidden email] wrote: 
> > I figure a co-op of knowledgeable people is far far more reliable than a 
> > corporation of idiots. 
> 
> lol!  Awesome quote!  Pretty much sums up the entire open source 
> movement as a whole, frankly. 

No real disagreement, but. The problem in a corporate software company 
is: 
You have essentially a product marketing person specifying requirements 
for a product. This tends to be dictated to the developers through 
either a project manager of line manager. What happens is that a lot of 
good ideas get lost for various reasons. One of the problems here is it 
tends to be more dictatorial where a number of important views are 
ignored. 

In a community based product, you generally have a community of people 
interacting. Normally, in FOSS there is someone who tends to be a 
leader. But, ideas are retained better, and the developers tend to have 
more authority at least to submit their ideas. When this breaks down, 
you can get a fork. 

The downside of FOSS is that while you generally get a better product 
with a faster bug-fix rate, is it also gives users too many choices. 

Back in the Windows 31 and Windows 95 days, there were some good 
non-MSFT tools that allowed the user to chose between desktop 
presentations, but those essentially disappeared to where you get 1 
Windows desktop. No choices, no confusion. 

In contrast in Linux and BSD we have KDE or GNOME for most everyone, 
and we have many other choices of Window managers for those who prefer 
it. How does a salesperson try to sell this to the average computer 
user who really is very non-technical as is the sales person. 

We can use the same analogy to a car. Other than big, small, blue or 
silver, every car has 1 steering wheel (not a choice of a wheel, a 
joystick),  a dashboard that that is essentially the same as every 
other.  The auto manufacturers found that the digital dashboards were 
unpopular so you simply get an analog speed dial, or a digital analog 
to that. My next door neighbor hasn't a clue how to use his GPS. My 
wife and I have to go to his car and set a destination. 

What I'm trying to point out is that the strength of FOSS (or community 
development) is choices, but this is also a weakness in the 
marketplace. Better sometimes does not sell as well as mediocre. 


-- 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <[hidden email]> 
Boston Linux and Unix 
PGP key id: 537C5846 
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846 
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