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Date:      Tue, 26 Sep 1995 03:01:55 -0700
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
To:        Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Cc:        kelly@fsl.noaa.gov (Sean Kelly), gryphon@healer.com, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-ports@freebs.org
Subject:   Re: ports startup scripts 
Message-ID:  <21914.812109715@time.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 25 Sep 1995 15:34:10 PDT." <199509252234.PAA06011@phaeton.artisoft.com> 

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> Jordan is wrong.  I was in the meeting in the conference room in Sandy,
> Utah when Kanwahl Rheki "gave way" the UNIX destop.
> 
> The UNIX desktop was not "lost", it was "conceded without a fight".

By the way, getting perfectly serious here for a moment, I don't
particularly think you're right either.  The fight was hardly
"conceded", It *was* lost, and lost through sheer incompetence!

You know how I like to compare the UNIX world to the Three Stooges
trying to fix a leaky faucet?  Nobody actually works on the faucet
throughout the entire episode - they're too wrapped up in seeing who
can poke the other the most times in the eye.  Well, that's how the
UNIX world has looked from an ISV's perspective for a LONG time!  Who
do you think *writes* the bloody desktop apps?  The ISVs.  Do you
think that we at Lotus, for example, were overjoyed at the prospect of
doing entirely separate and laborious ports of NOTES, 1-2-3 and AmiPro
to everthing from SunOS to HP/UX?  No, we weren't.  We were stuck
doing 6 different platforms, in fact, all of which were majorly
different from one another!  It was the polar opposite of fun!  And we
were the bloody UNIX *experts* of the company!  You can only imagine
how it looked from everyone else's perspective.  The occasional VP
would stroll through and see this workgroup filled with literally
several million dollars worth of top end HP, IBM and Sun hardware and
they'd look at this little engineering group full of very highly paid
engineers (we were rare!) and they'd sort of shake their heads and say
"you need ALL this stuff to service a market 1/10th the size of OS/2
or Windows?"  And we'd say "yup!  pretty #%&@*! stupid, ain't it!"

Bitter?  Oh, not us.  We wanted MORE versions of UNIX.  Binary
compatibility?  Heck no!  Crazy ideas like that only let us stay home
with our families on the weekends!  Needless to say, this was not an
unusual attitude among the other ISVs who provided you with everything
from Framemaker to Adobe Photoshop and THAT is why UNIX lost, yes
lost, the desktop market.  UNIX was a highly dysfunctional family that
fought so long and hard that the children were finally taken away by
social services.

					Jordan



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