Oh boy, we are in for some fun times. This Ian guy is uniquely on the ball from what I just read on his blog. I think he could either do great things with Solaris, or try to do great things and be kicked off the boat :)
And now for some one-way discussion and/or hazing. "Solaris is great technology with an incredible pedigree and some very compelling features" Solaris+Java could win desktop market share by combating Windows+C# for the title of "most productive development environment". Where do you go to save the most money and produce the best work in the shortest amount of time? "I don’t buy into the notion that software-as-a-service displaces the traditional fat client entirely, for one very simple reason: It’s going to be a while yet before we have truly ubiquitous network connectivity." Online-everything with offline fallback sure is the future, but we needn't have it now to push the thin-client paradigm forward. The so-close but so-far stepping stones are USB memory devices and then wifi smartphones with mass onboard storage. Put a multi-platform GUI on said memory from which you can load your multi-platform data. The OS doesn't matter to anyone normal. It doesn't matter to them now, and it never will. People only care about their data and their applications. The OS only matters insofar as it allows user applications to exist. Windows does this best: it doesn't get in the way of what you want to do, and it actually gives you some added value (Direct X, not much else) as well. Linux distros don't really add anything except low sticker prices, and they actually hinder with poor hardware support, poor UI, non-standardized applications, etc. Solaris is more of the same, except it does add some value with unique systems such as ZFS. PS: A huge problem to talk about is the anti-consumer telecom industry, but that is a whole different ball of wax. " “Google’s current offerings–Gmail, Docs & Spreadsheets, etc.–bear all the markings of a classic disruptive technology. As Harvard professor Clayton Christensen observed, [...] as the lower end product gets better, and the incumbent is forced to migrate to even more complex and expensive solutions, more of the overall customer base defects. And, then, voila, one day the incumbent wakes up and discovers that it is DEC, Sears, or AOL“ " I find Clayton Christensen's analysis (or at least its blog'd interpretation) to be somewhere between skewed and incorrect. It is dripping with the over-complication and clouding of the truth that academia unfortunately produces so prolifically. The roles filled by Sears and AOL were filled by new, superior solutions. Just like when a larger lion enters the pride on the savanna, the weaker solution will be replaced simply by virtue of it being weaker in the attributes that decide life or death in combat. In these examples, the little guy disrupting the market already had and would continue to have the superior solution. And they were a significantly better and different solution. The big guys could have adjusted, and sometimes they do. But Sears and AOL were too ignorant, slow, unwilling or unable to beat the little guy. Hindsight says that Sears could have started a low-cost high-value spinoff to combat Walmart. Or AOL could have bought up cable providers (which AT&T is doing right now, by the way) when modem service commodified. In any case, the customers defected because there was a clearly superior solution to their problem. Nothing AOL could do to their existing solution was able to counter the fundamentally different and superior solution offered by fast commodity internet access and swaths of free content online. Anyone up for some chocolate cake? Ian, I hope you make Solaris work with my network and SATA cards. :) This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
