You have to peddle your wares...
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| vorbote Jul 07, 2007 7:53 PM EDT |
And that's precisely what the Indiana project is about. The author of this article doesn't know or chooses to ignore that you can't get your foot in the door if you don't put your foot in the door. And that's how Microsoft managed to displace the UNIX(tm) vendors out of the back room: They peddled and pushed Windows 3.1 down the throats of many colleges and universities in the USA and abroad at the beginning of the 1990's. Therefore many students at the time learned to use Microsoft operating systems instead of UNIX(tm) as it had been the norm during the 80's. Those former students pushed Microsoft products everywhere they went to work when they entered the job market in the exercise of their professional careers. Then when GNU/Linux stated to be an attractive proposition in the late 1990's, the students at that time came in contact with the concepts of FOSS. These people are now, ten years after, raising to mid-level and top-level managerial positions and therefore we see the adoption of GNU/Linux and the displacement of Microsoft operating systems out of the back room and even the desktop. Now, imagine if Sun can make Solaris so attractive that young people studying to enter the IT world use it and like it at least as much as GNU/Linux. When they go out into the real world, they'll take that knowledge and preference with them and Sun will have put a foot in the door of businesses, many of which had already discarded the possibility of using Sun products, not necessarily due to their high hardware prices, you pay for quality, but most importantly because of the scarcity and expense of hiring knowledgeable people to administer and maintain the software and equipment. |
| herzeleid Jul 07, 2007 9:01 PM EDT |
Well said. Of course, the best case scenario would have solaris and the linux vendors continually upping the ante, striving to outdo each other and become the top dog. Not through microsoft-style hardball politics, bribes and dirty back room deals, but by making an OS so awesomely great, reliable, and fun to use that a good portion of the market chooses to tune out the constant background noise of frantic, blaring microsoft hype and go with substance and quality, rather than well-funded high pressure marketing. Everyone wins... well, except for the chairs in monkey boy's office... |
| azerthoth Jul 08, 2007 12:00 AM EDT |
Another of the downfalls of Unix that Microsoft was the unintentional beneficiary from is that at the time they started their move the Unix folks were busy ripping each other apart. So obsessed were they in their own political infighting that Bill and company were pretty much unchallenged. Does that seem familiar to anyone else? |
| tracyanne Jul 08, 2007 12:42 AM EDT |
Quoting:Does that seem familiar to anyone else? Yes. Microsoft had very little to no competition, and they made it extremely easy for people to move the competitions file formats to Microsoft file formats, by providing excellent translators (exactly as they are attempting to do with ODF to OOXML), while only using standards where it benefited Microsoft. |
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