From owner-freebsd-chat Fri May 17 16:19:43 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from flamingo.mail.pas.earthlink.net (flamingo.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.232]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2EBEE37B403 for ; Fri, 17 May 2002 16:19:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from pool0373.cvx21-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net ([209.179.193.118] helo=mindspring.com) by flamingo.mail.pas.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #2) id 178qzL-0004e3-00; Fri, 17 May 2002 16:18:20 -0700 Message-ID: <3CE58F73.1A7F50AF@mindspring.com> Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 16:17:07 -0700 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Sony} (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Giorgos Keramidas Cc: Miguel Mendez , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: The road ahead? References: <20020516004909.A9808@daemon.tisys.org> <20020516151801.A47974@energyhq.homeip.net> <20020516172853.A7750@daemon.tisys.org> <3CE40759.7C584101@mindspring.com> <20020516220616.A51305@energyhq.homeip.net> <3CE43D08.1FDBF0A3@mindspring.com> <20020517163624.GB9697@hades.hell.gr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Giorgos Keramidas wrote: > > > 2) Remove *all* man pages and online documentation > > > > B) #2 is defacto done; compare the info and man pages for gcc > > or gld, some day > > But the info pages can be installed for both programs, as part of the > system installation. What was your point again? Humans obtain information by selecting a Schelling point, and attempting to obtain information there. Despite the attempts by the GNU crowds, the "info" format is not the preemminent Schelling point for UNIX systems, man pages are. Therefore, any documentation which does not exist in the man pages defacto does not exist. If you want confirmation, I suggest you search for "Schelling" in your favorite search engine. While you are at it, ask yourself why you went to that search engine, instead of any one of dozens of others: why does that search engine itself represent a Schelling point to you? How is it that you knew to go there, instead of somewhere else? If you can answer these questions, you will be more than half the way to realizing why, in the scheme of the Internet "bubble", almost all of the "portal plays" have failed to result in the traditional "brand loyalty" that marketers of traditional products rely upon. Or to put it another way: you will know why people's loyalty won't stay bought. I'll give you a hint: there is a disproportion between barriers to entry and barriers to exit on intangibles which is not there with tangible consumables, which tend to keep your "loyalty" by remaining there until they are "used up". Now compare this with "my default home page". > > > 3) Make the system horrendously obfuscated > > C) #3 is defacto done > > As a documentation writer, I am terribly offended :P > > This also seems like you're suggesting that the FreeBSD developers do > their best to obfuscate the programs and code they write. In a system > like FreeBSD that tries to follow standards like SUSv3 or similar, > this is not possible and not wanted. I think you're doing harm to > FreeBSD in this. Harm that is not needed, and certainly not deserved > by all the people who are trying to make FreeBSD an operating system > and environment easier to us :-/ As a user, I'm terribly offended that any documentation at all is required to use any software in the first place. ;P. The standards which are conformed to were designed within the same principles framework that resulted in software which was hard to use without documentation in the first place. The epitome of good technology is the device with but a single button on it, which doesn't look fearfully dangerous to press, and which is a "do what I wanted done" button. A bad example from personal experience was the Whistle InterJet; it had a lot of buttons on the front, which not only raised the overall cost, but implied configuration and exposed complexity (there was plenty of both, in fact). People bought InterJets to connect their small businesses to the Internet. They were less painful than the precursor, but they could hardly be said to represent an epitome of good technology. A much better paradigm would have been a single round green button on the front, wich connected your small office to the Internet. As the engineers who developed and invented the InterJet, we weren't allowed to build the product that people needed. Instead, we had a lot of "input" from people who had already decided that connecting a small office to the Internet was a complex task, and that the product was there to serve a user interface -- not a customer need -- and that the purpose of the user interface was to manage complexity, using abstract representational geometries that were somehow superiour, having passed through a PhD who didn't think like an "uneducated end user" in the first place. So what would be the epitome of design for such a device? 1) If I press the green button, it connects my office to the Internet. 2) If I hold the green button down long enough, the machine shuts off. In other words, the "big green button" is an ATX power switch. There are a couple of intermediate technical obstacles, but they are not completely unscalable. Most of them have to do with a steadfast refusal to manage the "link.local" problem, the DHCP server grab that Microsoft staged, and the lack of support for service location in Microsoft Operating systems causing an unnecessarily increased complication for hardware configuration. But of course, actually *fixing* problems, instead of coming up with some Rube Goldbergian scheme for working around them, does not present a barrier to entry to competitors, does it? And for some reason, we don't trust ourselves to step out in front in the first place -- *and then be able to stay out in front of the parade*. There's actually a German company building an InterJet-like device. You can buy one today, off the shelf, from Fry's electronics, for around US$400. It has a keypad, like the InterJet, and it has an LCD panel (at the bottom, rather than the top). Actually, I would call such devices in a small business "file cabinet top" boxes: they fill the ecological niche in a small business that in a home would be filled by set-top boxes. So the location of the LCD screen on the bottom of the front panel rather than the top is a good design decision -- as far as it does. But the German device embodies the same assumptions which led to IBM eventually shutting down the IBM GSB Division (the former Whistle Communications), when they didn't get out of it what they expected to get out of it, when they bought it. It makes the assumptions that an LCD panel is necessary at all, and that a keypad is necessary at all, because, well, that's the assumption made in the design of the InterJet, and they aren't really breaking new ground, so much as they are copying a design. To be fair, IBM's expectations were unreasonable to start with, and those expectations were set by people wanting an exit for money, rather than by people who wanted to convey a proper sense of the product: they lacked faith, and so could not convey faith to the IBM people. IBM thought they were buying a human factors design which could succeed where their own designs had not, in a market that IBM wanted to capitalize. If Whistle hadn't tried to make the sale on human factors, the outcome could have been much more positive. IBM's own "dirty little secrets" with regard to business practices didn't help, and the overall result was a cascade failure. No need to go into them now. > > > 4) Become rich by selling FreeBSD manuals at $100 a pop :-) > > > > D) #4 Doesn't work in the presence of a monopolist with a > > competing product who doesn't pull the same pig-trick > > So making a profit out of FreeBSD by using those same ``dirty tricks'' > mentioned above, can not be done. You're effectively stating that this > is already done in B) and then later argue that it can't be done. > > Now I'm thoroughly confused. FreeBSD is not a first mover. Such a strategy will work, if you have first mover advantage. FreeBSD has no such advantage. Note that a "first mover" is not necessarily the same as "first to market". This is a common assumption, but it is wrong. The Microsoft strategy, and, in general, the Japanese corporate consumer electronics strategy are both incredibly successful, and they are built on the foundation of being "first to be second" for any given market. These companies rarely innovate, which is why slashdot and other technical forums tend to find Microsoft's protestations that they would be "unable to innovate in the future" so laughable. In fact, we can read Microsoft's successes and failures on the basis of projects which do and do not fit this philosophy. Since its beginning, Microsoft has failed in every "first to market" case, and succeeded in *almost* every "first to be second" case. "Money", "Word", "Excel", "Windows", "DOS", ...all but a few of their products, in fact, follow this model closely. The notable exceptions (like the Microsoft Mouse) are actually supporting products, more than they are products in their own right: they are infrastructure. Novell did the same thing when they bought a network card manufacturer, and dropped the hardware prices low enough that network cards hit the point where they became commodities, and it was possible for them to be used as "paving material" in support of other products, which assumed LAN connectivity for machines within a business: Novell's real target market. The FreeBSD approach fails to provide for a "Chasm Crossing Strategy", as Geoffrey Moore (formerly of Regis McKenna, now of the Chasm Group) would say. It has OK appeal to early adopters (classic technophiles like it -- this is "geek appeal"), but it has yet to have any real value in the mainstream. While "Yahoo" is widely regarded as a success story for FreeBSD, it's hardly the "reference account" that can be used to leverage "sales" (for Free software, this is really a measure of market penetration and mindshare, not revenue) in other market segments or categories. Yahoo is not "GM" or "American Express" or "Delta Airlines", etc.. The issue is one of market segmentation, and then choice of the correct segment in which to compete, such that you don't face the barriers you will face if you attempt to shotgun all over the map. FreeBSD has failed to service a market segment in which it has an advantage like this -- a marget segment in which it is not up against monopolistic forces. Instead, it shotguns, and tries to be all things to all people, or, worse, declares that any market in which it has failed to arrive at a success strategy is "not our target market" (the reductio ad absurdum of that argument is that, eventually, your "target" is pared down to one fourteen year old "Barbie" owner in Des Moines, Iowa). Right now, the initial barrier to entry is installation. Windows comes pre-installed on much of today's computer hardware. For that computer hardware which is being put to applications where Windows is ill-suited, FreeBSD is not built to solve the problems in that problem domain, out of the box. In addition, the installation process is cumbersome, and has not been abstracted sufficiently. There is no single "big green button" for any particular segment which FreeBSD "hopes to serve". And there is no direction for that "hope". Linux is prety much in the same boat; it has a public goal ("Destroy Microsoft"), which a lot of jaded geeks can get behind, but it has not arrived. It, too, is still on the "early adopter" side of the "chasm" in the technology adoption lifecycle. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message