Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 08:01:02 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm-dated-1018274463.3edac7@mired.org> To: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Anti-Unix Site Runs Unix Message-ID: <15531.2846.277278.29276@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <012601c1dadb$104d5100$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <20020402113404.A52321@lpt.ens.fr> <3CA9854E.A4D86CC4@mindspring.com> <20020402123254.H49279@lpt.ens.fr> <009301c1da83$9fa73170$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <15530.6987.977637.574551@guru.mired.org> <012601c1dadb$104d5100$0a00000a@atkielski.com>
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In <012601c1dadb$104d5100$0a00000a@atkielski.com>, Anthony Atkielski <anthony@atkielski.com> typed: > Mike writes: > > There's no money in that, so why should > > anyone do it? > Agreed. > > In particular, in an industry dominated by > > a company that gained that position by shipping > > buggy products and making money on upgrades, > > there's no incentive to do anything else. > I suspected you wouldn't be able to simply stop at that point without saying > something about your Great Satan, and I was right. Of course. I suspected you'd assume I was talking about your particular infatuation, and I was right as well. > > No, what makes a product successful is selling > > lots of copies. > You can only sell lots of copies if you can keep your technical support > costs down. That imposes an upper limit on the number of bugs you can ship. > And that limit is considerably lower than you seem to believe. Microsoft find a way around that. They offload the tech support costs onto the supply chain. They can therefore ship products with basically unlimited numbers of bugs, and are more than happy to do so. > > Being crashfree doesn't do that *nearly* as well > > as convincing people that there isn't an alternative. > Most people who have moved to OSes like NT and XP have done so because of > better resistance to things like crashes. I didn't particularly care for XP > because I don't like the "activation" feature (a euphemism for making you > pay forever for the same software), but I have to admit that it has been > completely and totally crash-proof thus far ... nothing seems to bring it > down. It seems to be as reliable as NT (no surprise, since it is _based_ on > NT). Since even Gates admitted that NT was a crash-prone piece of junk, one would hope that XP is *more* reliable than NT. Of course, it's selling into the Windows 95/98/ME desktop market, so it doesn't have to be to be an improvement on what people were using before. > > Last time I checked, Linux had more desktops > > than the Mac. > Linux had zip, last time I saw numbers. Servers don't count when you are > considering desktops. Similarly, FreeBSD is far more present among servers > than among desktops. Of course servers don't count. But until one of us produces numbers, we'll have to agree to disagree. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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