Re: [LUG] Next Microsoft CEO?

[Philip Hudson <phil.hudson@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 5 Sep, 2013, at 7:47 am, Simon Avery wrote:

> > it would be nice to know that we'd have
> > > something like 95% worldwide free software adoption.
> >
> > Do we not already? Proprietary is just a thin layer over FLOSS  
> > these days.
> >
> > How do you come to that conclusion?
>
> Business standards are still all about commercial (and proprietary)
> software, even if there is a wider push for open standards between  
> them.
>
> Windows, Office, Sage. That's a typical working environment in the  
> west.
>
> And then you've got all the CMS's, management and planning suites, a  
> huge
> array of intranet platforms, some of which are very expensive, lots of
> unique and bespoke code written because that company can't find an  
> off-the
> shelf solution, FLOSS or commercial.
>
> Not much floss I can see in that?

PCs add up to zero percent of the processor market, and office work is  
zero percent of digital-computer use, TOAFA.

But even there, how many don't have an intranet? How many don't use  
cloud services? They may have non-FLOSS at one or more layers of that  
stack, but that's just dinosaur-foolishness; it's diminishing fast and  
won't last much longer. How could it?

Sun was a great business, making great chips and great computers and  
other great hardware, with a great OS and a great web dev language and  
a could-be-great IDE and a pretty-good app server and a good-enough  
office suite and various other worthwhile and even FAIB but still  
proprietary offerings, all built on a commendable philosophy of  
openness, standards and networking, with a huge and mostly well- 
satisfied high-end high-spend tech-savvy customer base. FLOSS killed  
Sun; the only surviving remnants are SPARC, Solaris, OpenOffice,  
NetBeans and Java, all FAIF now, although most of them are not in  
particularly good shape. They (we) thought HP and IBM were our  
competition, but it was really Red Hat. We thought our Oracle-optimal  
SPARC/Solaris combo guaranteed us high-margin hardware sales forever;  
MySql (plus good-enough Oracle performance on linux) killed that. We  
sold almost all the web servers in the world pre-LAMP; almost none  
thereafter. That's not the whole story -- Scott et al made a long  
series of big mistakes -- but it's the most important bit.

--
Phil Hudson                  http://hudson-it.no-ip.biz
@UWascalWabbit                 PGP/GnuPG ID: 0x887DCA63


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