From: "Dan Perley" To: "GOSLING members in Ottawa" Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2006 22:52:32 -0400 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2869 Subject: Re: [OTT-GOSLING] United Way - only IE allowed Reply-To: GOSLING members in Ottawa Sender: ottawa-gosling-bounces@list.goslingcommunity.org For the love of Bill??? This is complete horsebucky!!!! All of it. Henry Ford did more than any person alive to democratize the technology of the automobile (and motor truck and tractor and very nearly the airplane). He was a very great man and I greatly admire him in many ways, but he also outlived his usefulness to both his company and to America and, among other things, declared history to be bunk, supported various anti-Semitic newspapers, published one of his own and almost certainly gave money to the American Nazi party. True too, Ford wanted mostly all the cars in America to be Fords and expected that it would just stay that way indefiniately - you could have any colour you wanted as long as it was black. Mezmerized by his own success he failed to realize (until about 1927) that Chevrolet's offerings of multiple coulours, company financing and ultimately a six-cylinder engine were on the verge of doing in the Ford Motor Company. Chrysler's Plymouth was gaining on him too by 1930. The same basic things are true of Gates; he is the Ford of the PC. But he too has maybe outlived his usefulness. Indeed, maybe for quite a while now! Below is an article I published more than a decade ago which (pointing out that Bill was ready for pasture even back then) - it should make you think very seriously about what happens when a person becomes too powerful and refuses to step down or move on - when he becomes too much of a good thing - as that has certainly happened with Bill Gates. The fact that he (and Ford and Fisk and Gould and Morgan too) set up generous philonthropic foundations in no way exempts them from the charge of becoming too powerful (and too would-be monopolistic) even for their own good as well as for the good of everyone else. ========================================================= MICROSOFT, WIN95 AND THE POWER OF ONE I was answering yet another question about my views on Microsoft and WIN95 recently, when a rather bizarre parallel came into my mind; between the evolution of what was euphemistically called 'die braune Revolution' (the Brown Revolution) in Germany and the emergence of Microsoft (MS) over the past decade. This parallel has some distinct limits, but it may still be worth considering. A good friend of my father's, who was a Presbyterian clergyman, attended the 1936 Berlin Olympics and on his return to Canada reported - with considerable amusement - that Anhalter Bahnhof (a major railway terminal) had been thronged with American tourists virtually all of whom had missed their trains! All of the trains, you see, had left precisely on time, quite unlike those of the New York Central, the Pennsylvania RR or for that matter even the CNR here in Canada. I am an amateur student of history and have always been fascinated with the history of the Nazi period in Germany. It's not that I would condone their racist leanings (nor their foreign policy), but rather because of my interest in how efficiently they managed the transition from science to technology and from basic technological capability to mass production. More efficiently, in fact, than any society which has existed before or since. It has always been my experience that you can learn useful things by looking in places where no one else is looking. (When was the last time you heard a politician stand up and suggest that we adopt a policy which the Nazi regime used? On second thought, when was the last time you heard one talk intelligently about technology management at all?) Once upon a time there was a brilliant (albeit horribly misguided) Austrian peasant who almost nobody took seriously, even after he wrote a book setting out exactly what he would do if he came to power. Then, largely through pure persistence and force of will he actually did come to power. The more educated the readers of his book were, the less credence they tended accord to everything in it. This was both ironic and a great shame, since he tended to stick quite closely to his own script. Closer attention to detail from the Western democracies, and firmer collective foreign policies on their part, might well have prevented World War Two. (See Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War for a preferable approach to handling expansionist dictators.) For a time, Hitler's regime took almost everyone by surprise and in altogether pleasant ways; it got most people working, cleaned the cities up and re-instilled a feeling of teamwork and belonging. Western leaders flocked in to see how it was done; our Prime Minister MacKenzie King was a particularly glowing (and public) admirer of Hitler's, although some historians might argue that King had perhaps consulted with his dog.... or perhaps Hitler's dog. Civil engineers came to study the Autobahns and by 1939 Lufthansa had flown the first FW-200 passenger landplane non-stop from Berlin to New York a distance quite beyond any similar aircraft of the time. Anyway, the guys who the members of the American Olympic team thought looked like Charlie Chaplin and a bunch of Hollywood extras had soon 'tidied up' Germany's borders by taking a nibble here and a little chunk there. Okay if we take these little chunks? No one seemed to mind, because this was just fixing some of the host of mix-ups left behind by the Treaty of Versailles (which I am not very proud to admit that one of my relatives signed on behalf of Canada.) The Western countries continued to bicker among themselves about various treaty issues, particularly when it came to Germany's massive re-armament program. Shiploads of ethnic refugees were turned away, even from the United States and Canada. Claims of persecution of Jews and others were largely ignored. Then it was 'Anschluss' with Austria, but no one got very excited since Austrians were all German-speakers anyway and many of them had wanted it. "So what?" Some more of East Prussia? "Okay!" Liechtenstein? "Ho hum..." The German-speaking Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia? "Oh well, just promise not to take any more!" ("Jawohl", said Hitler, and British PM Chamberlain returned with the famous 'piece of paper') More of Czechoslovakia and finally the rest of it? "Oops!" Poland? World War Two! The rest is history, as they say, but the experts should have seen this bit of history coming. Churchill truly pointed out that those who refuse to learn from history are usually condemned to repeat it. Once upon a time there was a brilliant (and quite genial) guy who had some crazy theories about how people would use little desktop computers in the future. He rather startlingly managed to negotiate a deal with IBM which set IBM (and indeed the entire world of computing) on its ear. MS-DOS, through at least moderately good design (although some will debate this) and through IBM's market reach, became the norm of the rapidly emerging PC world, killing off CP/M's offspring (CP/M-86/80) almost before it could leave the nest. The other PC operating systems of the day never had a chance. Then MS began to branch into some other things and started to buy out some companies. No problem, high tech companies buy other high tech companies all the time. So now he was in the applications business too? Well, so were IBM and DEC so that was okay. Then, his fancy was caught by the windowing work which started out in the academic and institutional world and which only Apple and some (mutually antagonistic) UNIX vendors had to that point successfully commercialized. He zeroed in - many would argue - on Apple's work and it soon appeared in MS product. There was a massive lawsuit which ended as a sort of Mexican stand-off. So now MS had windowing? That was okay too since windowing probably made computing easier, particularly for young children and for new users. So now MS was very much bigger and was also telling computer makers that if they bought any MS operating systems they had to buy one for each system they sold, even those actually sold with someone else's. This time the victims cried foul, but (in my view at least) the court result was not a clear win on their part. Apple began to wane and still the UNIX vendors continued to bicker among themselves. MS meanwhile bought some more software companies, widely captivated the hearts and minds of users and began introducing more operating systems. Some government procurement people even started to place 'reverse-onus' on technology architects to prove why their recommendations should be anything other than MS, and this not just for the desktop, but for small and midrange servers as well. Now NT began to loom as a major threat to UNIX and OS/2 in the micro-based server (MBS) arena and gave some evidence of having aspirations of moving up-tier to midrange systems (MRS) and maybe even to even larger platforms. Barriers to the use of more than four CPU's with NT were being lifted so this up-tier migration is certainly plausible. In the other camp, the UNIX vendors now miraculously discovered that after 15 years of tooth-and-nail disputes they could all live with a common set of 1170 API's. What a surprise! Herein lay the modest beginnings of the reaction to what was by then already obvious as the imminent hegemony of MS over the entire computing industry, at least at the PC and MBS tiers. Now MS decided that it would like to go into value-added networks and also that its MS-Windows 3.1/3.11 products must surely be replaced by WIN95. Of course, there is nothing wrong with upgrading products, but usually (in past) this has happened to take advantage of new technology, not to so that software can drag technology along in its wake. The difference in the move from MSW to WIN95 is that it is dictated not so much by technological advancement or by necessity, but rather by one company and for that company's own benefit. Two further counter-developments have started in the past couple of years: -the X/Open folks now have a branding program which is truly credible and lets you carry applications and data among the different Single UNIX Specification systems with more confidence than before and they may brand applications too; and -Netscape and friends give every impression of creating a user groundswell in favour of the more open and democratic nature of the Internet. MS is bad-mouthing this latter development at every possible opportunity it would seem, so they must see it as a threat. There is no longer any question as to whether open systems are viable and they still dominate the power-user workstation and midrange tiers. In the workstation world NT gives no advantage over UNIX and brings proprietary baggage; on MRS equipment NT is still an 'evolving' OS. The issue is whether we want to surrender these tiers to the MS juggernaut and what we will get in return if we do. I still stand by my statement in a previous column that Bill Gates has done an immense amount to popularize desktop computing, to make it better and to make it more fun. His efforts deserve a mountain of gold; indeed, he already has one. However, has MS reached its practical limit in terms of influence on the overall course of the industry and does the company need to quickly gain the maturity to realize that fact? Very possibly so. Many historians consider the 'Prague Spring' as the point from beyond which Hitler could not find his way back. Had he died weeks earlier, some of them might argue that his persecution of minorities (minor compared to what came later) would have been overlooked by history. He might have gone down in history as a great leader. The fact is, though, that by continuing far beyond what was reasonable either in foreign policy (or in the treatment of ethnic minorities) he created a situation in which the bad he had done far outweighed the good. He is correctly judged by history in that light. Is Bill Gates approaching - or on the brink of - his own Prague Spring? Usually, though not always, one requires some time after an event to judge it in its historical significance or context. True too, Gates wrote his book after coming to power, not before. Still, we are now at a point where even the most positive advocates of MS and its products may have begun wondering if it is possible for one company, and one man, to have too much power. Since I am not running a multi-billion dollar company, and have not created tens of thousands of high tech jobs through my own efforts, my reluctance to criticize someone who has is quite natural. Nonetheless, we may be reaching a point where Bill Gates' best contributions to our industry are in the past, not the future. This clearly includes WIN95, which although it brings some benefits would force millions of users into otherwise unrequired upgrades. We know that 32-bit systems offer superior performance, but let us also look at what the thundering majority of business and government computer users are actually doing with their computers. Do they already have enough hardware, OS and application power now for word processing, faxing, Internet access, groupware and so on? In very many cases, the answer is already yes. The forces of openness have rallied and we now face the coming storm of the battle which will decide whether or not one company, and one person, will be permitted to dominate desktop computing and perhaps our entire industry for the next decade. That may turn out to be, in large part, what the WIN95 battle for market acceptance is really all about. ========================================================== ----- Original Message ----- From: "Georges Labrèche" To: ; "GOSLING members in Ottawa" Sent: Monday, October 23, 2006 10:11 PM Subject: Re: [OTT-GOSLING] United Way - only IE allowed They teach us many things at school. For instance in Project Management they will teach us that the client has the last word and we should only worry about costs, effort, avoiding over-budget, managing resources and whatnot. In other words; business. In courses that deal more with software development, architecture and such it's all about software quality attributes (Maintainability, Reliability, Reusability, Robustness, etc) > A charity that doesn't follow all accessibility guidelines, and lock > people into specific technologies and specific visual/etc ways to > access, is not a charity that deserves to receive any donations at all. Whoa! HARSH! Surely you don't mean that. I mean come on; should people deny help to their fellow less fortunate human beings just because, somewhere in between, a few idiots screwed up on aspects you are sensitive to? Aspects so trivial compared to the greater cause that is defended by a charitable organization? Now this is what I would consider total nonsense. One shouldn't lose sight of the human aspect of things, never. I support Bill Gates and Microsoft because without it, there would be no such thing as a "Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation". Bill Gates alone is the largest charitable foundation in the world. This means that millions of people who suffer under extreme povrety and unhealthy condtions depend on one and only one man. Now, I am able to see the humane side of things and give him my full support regardless of how I disagree with some of his policies in the IT industry. Now, following your twisted logic, is such a foundation not worth existing because of what's behind it? On 10/23/06, Joseph Potvin wrote: > > George, Do thay actually teach it this way at UofO?? > > Russell McOrmond wrote: > > Georges Labrèche wrote: > > > >>Having been involved in development of various web application projects > I > >>and the teams I've been in always favoured IE as the supported browser > >>(exluding ITERation I suppose, of course...). Why? Because developping > and > >>testing web applications to properly function on different browsers adds > a > >>significant amount of overhead and time to the project development's > life > >>cycle, especially during the quality assurance phases. > > > > > > I consider this total nonsense. There is no utility to having the > > applications dependent on client-side functionality that becomes > > implementation specific. Not being platform specific was one of the > > design goals of the Web itself, and I have a hard time considering a > > platform-specific tool to be a "web application". > > > > The least costly way to develop a website is to develop to standards, > > and to ignore advanced functionality that requires large amounts of > > testing at all. Being browser-dependent costs *more* money, not less. > > > > A charity that doesn't follow all accessibility guidelines, and lock > > people into specific technologies and specific visual/etc ways to > > access, is not a charity that deserves to receive any donations at all. > > > _______________________________________________ > Ottawa-gosling mailing list > Ottawa-gosling@list.goslingcommunity.org > http://list.goslingcommunity.org/mailman/listinfo/ottawa-gosling > _______________________________________________ Ottawa-gosling mailing list Ottawa-gosling@list.goslingcommunity.org http://list.goslingcommunity.org/mailman/listinfo/ottawa-gosling _______________________________________________ Ottawa-gosling mailing list Ottawa-gosling@list.goslingcommunity.org http://list.goslingcommunity.org/mailman/listinfo/ottawa-gosling