On Tue, Oct 27, 1998 at 09:22:33AM -0500, Bob Munck wrote:
> > ONly FUD and the lack of silly useless pointy-haired-boss-pleasing
> > "business applications" has prevented it from sinking Microsoft's ship,
>
> Here you start to lose me. Apps are what sells PCs, not the goodness
> of their OS. As a minimum, Linux has to have a web browser, spreadsheet,
> word processor, and presentation editor.
Already has these. *Has* had them. Also has an image/graphic editor
(the GIMP) which has been favorably compared with PhotoShop -- which even
surprised me. If you like the commercial flavor, try ApplixWare, which
gets you the standard apps in a 8-package bundle for $99.
Or take a look at GNOME (www.gnome.org) which is putting together
an integrated environment from the toolkit/library level up through
integrated applications. Or look at KDE (www.kde.org) which just
was adopted by Caldera in July as part of their Linux offering,
and is a roughly similar project. Oracle and Sybase are porting
their products to it, if you really *must* have a commercial
database (blech). And other vendors are starting to trip over
themselves in their haste to port their products. Check any
of Internet Week/Internet World/PC Week/Network World/InfoWorld/Internet
Weekly for announcements on the commercial front, www.linux.org
for announcements on the freeware front.
Which raises the question of why people actually want all this junk;
I'm very much underimpressed with "business applications".
I don't think most people in business have a friggin' clue how to
actually use them to run their businesses, but they certainly seem
bent on making their businesses use them -- at all costs. I've watched
people spend millions on "management information systems" and "groupware
productivity applications" for people who can't manage and people
who can't produce *without* them, let alone after being saddled
with 'em.
Yet folks continue to fall all over themselves to buy this stuff.
It's amazing. If I were a little more cynical, I'd be tempted
to write a bloatware app that does absolutely *nothing* and then
see how many Fortune 500 CIOs I could talk into buying it, *and*
paying for support for it when it turned out not to do anything. ;-)
BTW, plenty of people are now buying PCs for what you might not
consider end-user apps: because Linux actually works, it's now
possible to deploy PCs as high-throughput web/mail/ftp/telnet/etc.
servers. Or use them as workstations. Or other kinds of things
that *didn't* sell PCs just a few years ago.
So I dunno if "apps sell PCs" is as true as it was, unless "apps"
includes things like web servers.
> See, this is the problem with the wild-eyed, knee-jerk, fanatic
> paranoid approach to rational discourse. You say something that
> makes a bit of sense, then follow it up with juvenile misspellings
> like "Internet Exploder" or "MS Wondoze," gratuitous insults of
> Gates or Jobs, or terminally-silly statements like the "progress
> of computing" thing above.
Actually, I'll *didn't* follow it up with juvenile mispellings.
(Though I do admit to using Micro$oft on previous occasions.)
And frankly, I don't think there's anything "wild-eyed, blah blah"
about it all. I didn't start out loathing Microsoft or Gates; they/he
convinced me to do so based on their behavior, the abysmal quality
of their products, and their flat-out lying over the last two decades.
Recent revelations (e.g. the stuff coming out in court, and in the
recently released book on Microsoft) simply confirm what anyone
with a pulse already knows: these people are not interested in
progress or innovation or anything other than making money by
*any* means they can. Ethics and responsibility simply aren't
part of their world view.
(Just so's you don't misunderstand: I don't have a problem
with people making money. I don't even have a problem, for the
most part, without people making a *lot* of money. I have a huge
problem with them doing so dishonestly, and that is precisely
what Microsoft has done.)
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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