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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