Micro$oft: Winning Against Linux The Smart Way

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Dan Ritter wrote:
| > Jerry Feldman wrote:
| > Is it just me, or is this complete gibberish:
| > "Emphasize the value of the ecosystem and integrity of the platform"
|
| A quick translation:
|
| ... And it will have a
| GUI. Linux is largely configured by people typing things into
| text files; that requires much more skill than answering a
| simple series of questions. More skill means more money."

The main thing that struck me about that site's sales talk  was  that
it's a nice illustration of the opposite. It took me a fair amount of
poking at random to get it to perform for me, and even  then,  I  was
never  too  sure  why  what I poked gave the response that I got.  It
shows a major problem with many GUI tools:  The  user  has  to  learn
every app from scratch.  A lot of time is wasted exploring the GUI to
figure out how to get it to do what you want.   Even  something  that
you've  used  before  can  be  "new" after a few months away from it,
because nothing carries over from other apps, and you don't  remember
what little you learned about a tool the last time you had to use it.

The unix/linux crowd, OTOH, figured out the benefits of a  (somewhat)
consistent,  text-based  config  scheme.   You  only need to learn an
editor to make changes, and any editor will do.  A  config  file  can
easily  contain commented-out examples of all the possibilities, with
accompanying comments.  You can easily jump around in a text file  by
scanning  for  keywords  or by marking lines for later reuse, This is
usually much easier than  remembering  how  to  navigate  a  maze  of
windows with no coherent organization.

I wonder how the MS sales folks would respond to linux  sales  people
using this site as a bad example of how the MS GUI approach works?


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 <:#/>  John Chambers
   +   <jc at trillian.mit.edu>
  /#\  <jc1742 at gmail.com>
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