[KLUG Advocacy] Re: Advocacy digest, Vol 1 #11 - 1 msg

Adam Williams advocacy@kalamazoolinux.org
05 May 2002 19:31:28 -0400


>>>>The cross examining of Microsoft's "expert" witness Stuart E. Madnick:
>>>>When government attorney Kevin Hodges asked him to name an operating
>>>>system....Madnick offered up KDE... GNOME...
>>>This reminds me of a saying attributed to Ghandi: 
>>>                First they ignore you
>>>                    Then they laugh at you
>>>                      Then they become angry at you
>>>                         Then you win
>>>It seems that while the rest of Microsoft is at stage three, this fellow is 
>>>still more or less at stage 1.
>>Stage 4 does require that one survive stage 3.
>Sure, Ghandi was one of those who did. I think Linux will be a similar
>winner, but it's a hard call in the middle of the fight.
>>I can think of several great packages that have died at stage 3:  OS/2, 
>This is a very special example, and it's been the subject of more than
>a little bit of litigation, too. OS/2 started as something of a joint
>venture between IBM and Microsoft, and M$ essentially jumped ship and
>moved to their own development after a time, which resulted in what we
>now know as Windows NT. IBM (which never knew how to market anything
>smaller than a refrigerator), was completely outflanked here. 

Ok,  but the point is M$ wanted OS/2 to die.  And when they "made" it so
newer-Win32 apps no longer ran under OS/2... kaput.
 
>>Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect, ....
>Actually, I think both of these products had good lifetimes before they 
>lost the competitive race to Microsoft, against which they more or less
>went head-to-head. Neither product survived the transition to Windows
>(or windowing systems in general) very well, and was thus vulnerable
>to saturation/monopoly marketing by Microsoft in the first year or so 
>after Windows 3.1 became pretty dominant. I was using both products
>on commercial Unix systems at the time. Lotus 1-2-3 almost ignored
>mouse interactions for some time, and got clobbered on Unix by other
>packages (like Wingz in the NYC financial community), and didn;t have

Yes, Winqz was AWESOME!  I remember recalc-ing a big spreadsheet and
practically falling out of my chair it was so fast (in comparison).  Too
bad it died.

>really good initial windowing versions. I recall the first attempts
>by WP to do a good windowing version, and they took very different
>directions on Windows 3.1 and Solaris. The Solaris and DOS versions
>were really very similar (interface-wise), while to Win3.1 version
>was just AWFUL!! It wasn't like these guys were missing some large
>block on knowledge availabel to their peers in Redmond, either. It
>was more like they didn't really know how to design good interfaces
>with all this graphic horsepower, and they were going to use their
>user base to test out some pretty interesting but somewhat impracti-
>cal ideas.
>Notthat aggressive marketing, bundling, and discount packaging had a 
>place in killing these packages, BUT they were also at vulnerable
>parts of their lifecycle, and had trouble shifting gears from the
>old model to the new. For a time, each had venerable products that
>were not quite as good in the new environment as something else.

I concede, this puts a pretty big whole in my argument,  making the
situation more hopeful.  Now we just need a vulnerable point in the M$
product life cycle.  Which may (with XP and new licenses) be what we are
see-ing.
 
>>MacOS (at least before OS/X,  lets face it, effectively the Mac
>>was dead, OS/X was a brilliant coup).
>But this is the way of things on the Mac, it goes from one brilliant
>coup to another, with lags in between. Apple made two key mistakes
>here... they kept the box pretty firmly closed, and they never really
>tried to target organizations. Had they opened things up a little, and
>had they developed a clearer picture of what kind of group-level com-
>puting they were trying to sell into and support, I think they would
>have done a great deal better. AS it is, The Mac has found a niche or
>two, but it appears that the niches found Apple, not the other way
>around.

True.  I see Mac winning back lost niches (artsy folks) and some new
niches (techies who need UNIX without the fuss).  Getting back the
schools is going to be tough, and neck-n-neck I think Linux is better
suited for that.    But if they can keep themselves at ~6% they can
survive, and those markets may be sufficient.  But I can't see a Mac
corporate desktop any time soon if ever.  For whatever reason however,
M$ has historically been willing to play soft-ball with Apple, and
artists have slot of clout in corps that employ them.  So sys-admins
whining that their Active Directory control can't reach down to the
Apple users will fall on deaf ears.

>>All these products (at least IMHO) were gunned down using quite focused
>>marketing and feature-tweaking tactics.  I'm certain I could think of
>>more if I spent some time meditating on it.  
>Well, "Office" is a classic example of repackaging. MS had all of these 
>products around, and the whole notion of an integrated suite had good
>market acceptance (Symphony, Works, Jazz, etc), but had suffered from 
>execution. The rising dominance of Windows provided a really good oppor-
>tunity to try this idea again, only with higher overall product quality,
>and lock-in product integration (which few people actually use). This
>time, the target wouldn't be consumers or even power users, but corporate
>environments. Um, I think it worked.

And it is a good idea, and has (I think) operationally paid off for
consumers.  They're are almost no stand-alone office automation products
of note anymore,  simple because (at least for power users) the lines
between basic wp, sp, and presentation functionality has blurred.  They
are mostly used for data presentation.  Modern spreadsheets are
certainly legitimate data acquisition and modeling tools,  but I'd be
surprised if 1% of sp applications deployed ever see such a use.

Witness the Open Office / Star Office internal component model.  It is
pretty much impossible to build a decent package without "integration"
as a key part.

>>There are others I could think of: Informix, OpenMail, etc... that were
>>great products that suffered from targeted marketing but in reality
>>probably died as a result of hopeless marketing and corporate
>>cluelessness.
>Indeed... well, there has always been lots of incompetence to go around. I
>think the history of products like 1-2-3 and WP effectively ends once the
>products (or the companies which developed around them) are gobbled up in
>an aquisition. Lotus was never really permitted to challenge Excel once it 
>became part of IBM, and WP never could regain the user base it had lost
>(through a bad release and a little more) once it was bought by Corel.
>>I mention this as I think there is still a realistic chance that M$ will
>>successfully crunch Open Source.  Not via technology, but through
>>"mandated" proprietary services (ala PassPort, Active Directory,
>>etc....) and whacked licensing and pricing policies (paying for use of
>>M$ software by computer count,  irregardless of whether M$ products are
>>loaded on the machine).
>Certainly this is one way M$ is trying to combat open source; some of these
>ideas have really upset a number of users, and we've also seen some of these
>policies relaxed, "postponed", or withdrawn entirely. It has become clear
>that M$ does not see a short-term fix to it's technical mistakes and problems,
>and is moving things to a level where they think they have a better chance.
>The weakness of Lotus, WP, etc. was that they were a lot smaller than M$ and
>could not compete for shelf space, mindshare, or exposure over the long haul,
>and were eventually beaten down. A lot of other competitors (like FoxPro)
>could simply be bought. The Linux/Free Software community does not have this
>weakness; there's no "Linux Corporation" to target. Now, the weakness of being

They do have a separate weakness, at least in the US.  You can scare
them crapless.  Arrest/sue enough people for things like reading DVDs,
reverse engineering the napster protocol, or even threats as nebulous as
shut down the Broadcast 2000 project and alot less people will be
willing to "publish" their creations.

>smaller has turned into a strength, by being distributed. Instead of fighting 
>one or two smaller opponents, there are dozens (at least) or hundreds (more
>realisticly) of adversaries, each fairly well targeted. Battleship Microsoft,
>well tuned to fighting other battlewagons (like IBM), or even picking off a
>few destroyers (like WP), is a lot more vulnerable to large groups of dive
>bombers, who, even when they miss, seem to survive, and will be better shots
>next time....

Light & fast vs. Big & slow.  An old story.  Another quip that applies
is "It isn't the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight
in the dog."  Open Source has the advantage of passion (people feel a
connection to their creations).  Of course disorganized and headless
passion can destroy itself as effectively as it's 'opponent'.