🚀 go-pugleaf

nazgul@alphalpha.com (Kee Hinckley) writes:

   We're trying to make applications on Unix friendly enough and
   consistant enough that Unix doesn't lose the commercial market.
   Sometimes I'm not even sure it's worth the effort.

Me neither.  I've been a UNIX geek for 10 years, with a sworn aversion
to Intel processors and anything resembling MS-DOS, but at the moment
I think that Windows/NT is likely to send the budding commercial
desktop UNIX market down in flames.  I've ordered my 486 box...

Even diehard UNIX shops like AT&T USL seems to be starting to acquire
the attitude that UNIX will lose the desktop and the display, and end
up being relegated to server machines.

   Some (many?) of you may not give a damn.  There certainly doesn't seem to
   be much effort in this direction in GNU software.

Indeed.  Even Cygnus is evidently making most of their money off of
using GCC for embedded applications, rather than making any headway
in the compiler market overall.  GCC is a truly wonderful thing, but
it's missing a lot of things that separate a "program" from a "product".
Sun's unbundled C compiler may generate worse code that GCC 2.0, but it's
a better product, and I can use it now.  This can make it worth the money
and lack of source code...

   [...] creeping featurism.  In case you were wondering, that kind of
   thing doesn't cut it in the real world.  Hell, we've had a number of
   customers who have asked us to take features *out* of our email product -
   things like hierarchical folders are just too complicated for them to
   deal with.  

Visix has had the same experience with most of our customers.  People
don't want an option for every possible kind of behavior--they want
simple, specialized software tools.  You know, like UNIX was designed
to support :).  Because of customer demand, we've actually had to design
a way to remove parts of our products and make them less functional...
Strange, but true.

   Okay.  Prepare a 30 page slide presentation with mixed graphics and text,
   your company logo and a standard slide background.  That took me about
   6 hours, including writing the talk.

For extra credit, do it with software you've never used before, and for
which you have no manual or online help handy.  You can do it on a Mac
or (mostly :)) on a PC running Windows.  You can't do it on a UNIX box,
unless you're using ports of Mac/Windows software...

   You don't win this game by being right, or being fast, or being
   technologically advanced (that should all be pretty clear already -
   we are talking Unix after all), you win *this* game by being cheap
   and easy.  And Unix isn't either.

Bingo.


Amanda Walker						      amanda@visix.com
Visix Software Inc.					...!uunet!visix!amanda
-- 
"The map is not the territory."		--Alan E. van Vogt