On Wed, Apr 2, 2014 at 5:24 AM, Jordan Hubbard j...@ixsystems.com wrote:
On Apr 1, 2014, at 10:11 PM, Matt Olander m...@ixsystems.com wrote:
This is like trying to predict automobile technology and dominant
car-makers by 1905. There's always room for competition. Take a look
at what's happening right now in the auto-industry. Tesla came out of
nowhere 125 years after the invention of the automobile and is doing
pretty well.
I think you're kind of making my point for me, Matt. :-)
Tesla benefitted entirely from deep pockets on the part of its investors.
Over $160M went into starting the company, of which $70M came from the
personal checking account of Elon Musk, the current visionary and CEO, and to
quote the wikipedia page: Tesla Motors is a public company that trades on
the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TSLA.[5] In the first quarter of
2013, Tesla posted profits for the first time in its ten year history.
Yep, in other words, Tesla has been losing money for over 10 years and only
just started turning a profit, after raising a mere $187M in investment and
$485M in loans from the US DOE. Your tax dollars at work! On top of all
that Tesla has only managed to make money at all by focusing exclusively the
highest end of the luxury car market, where profit margins are also the
highest (the first car, the roadster, would set you back $110,000).
Getting back to computer operating systems, it would make most readers of
these lists choke on their Doritos to know how much Apple had to invest in
Mac OS X before it became a viable desktop operating system and of course
you've already seen folks screaming about how Apple gear is too expensive and
they'll never buy it.
You just don't get a consumer-grade desktop Unix OS, or a practical
all-electric sedan, without serious monetary investment and a luxury marquee
to match, assuming you'd like to actually make any of that money *back*.
So, back to BSD on the desktop. Anyone got a spare $200M they'd like to
just throw away? That's what it's going to take! :)
Don't believe me? Go ask someone who knows first-hand then. Ask Mark
Shuttleworth:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/why-ubuntus-creator-still-invests-his-fortune-in-an-unprofitable-company/
Yeah, no doubt it will cost a bit of money to compete on that level.
However, have you ever heard the phrase pioneers suffer where settlers
prosper? Meaning it may (or may not!) take significantly less to
compete once a lot of the harder problems are solved.
If we take the fact that PCs are on the decline but device adoption is
on the rise, perhaps we could focus on an Android competitor (*cough*
Cyb0rg *cough).
Wouldn't it be possible to run Android apps on *BSD via a java vm? I
will get you an Ubuntu phone for Christmas and we can try it :P
-matt
P.S., I do not have 200 million but I'm good for 10k :P
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