[ILUG] Bob Metcalf's "Why Linux Will Fail."

[Twomey_Mark at emc.com]

Ahh Bob,
	 I see he raises a point that a single person cannot write a word
processing application with the functionality of Word in a single weekend
"not matter how much Coke you drink". I assume that's why we have legions of
people working on KOffice.

So W2K (These people will attempt to cash in on anything), is going to give
us "rebels" a good seeing to. Firstly I cant see how the next bloated
revision of legacy baggage carrying NT is going to change the usage of Linux
by the people who already have it. 
If Linux growth was to stop dead right this minute, but development was to
continue we still have a large slice of the server market and nice in-roads
in the desktop market. We also have MS running around looking to hire people
from outside the company so they can come up with a game plan to use against
Linux. 
I get the impression that the Borg are having difficulty adapting to
technology that they cannot "embrace, extend & extinguish". 

So what if Linux uses 30 year old technology, so does your television and I
don't see Bob harping on about how that is going to get blasted off the
technology landscape (Though he may have a while back...someone check the
archives), Win2000 is nothing more than VMS with the Win9x GUI and I.E.
badly pasted on top of it. Someone should ring up and tell this guy that
Win2000 is not Cairo with it's fabled Object-Oriented Filesystem,heck it not
even a shadow of what was promised with Cairo. Pundits are already
predicting that it will ship without Active Directory Services in a usable
fashion. Where are the technologies that supersede the Linux development
community?, and if they do have some Linux killer Technology, all they have
is a slight head start. 
The moment an issue is raised you can be sure that somewhere the short
development cycle is going to kick in and some Open Source project will
start up to neutralise the threat

So what do we have to worry about....
Nothing!
We have already made grabbed server seats, mindshare as well as "making the
other guy blink". We cant lose because we have nothing to lose. But Bob
seems to think that we are a group of pinko commies who Microsoft is going
to crush the same way they crushed Digital Research and Quarterdeck.
Microsoft are having difficulty knowing what to attack, they are not the
invulnerable giant that the press and their competitors would like to make
them out to be.
As for Java somehow being a form of killer technology, Not the way Sun are
hobbling it, also note that Java is based on "20 year old technology" so it
has ten years to finish off MS, before Bob can poo-poo it as being old and
out of date.

Btw I see he has revised the date for his "Internet gonna End" idea, it
seems to me that soon he'll be up on stage going "Any day now folks...you'll
see and then you'll be sorry!."

I think Bob is the one drinking too much Coke   

Mark.

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	kevin at suberic.net [SMTP:kevin at suberic.net]
> Sent:	Monday, June 21, 1999 9:16 PM
> To:	metcalfe at idg.net; ilug at linux.ie
> Subject:	[ILUG] Bob Metcalf's "Why Linux Will Fail."
> 
> 
> In reference to:
>     http://www.infoworld.com/articles/open/xml/990621opmetcalfe.xml
> 
> Saw this in the Irish Times - some archeologists dug up the world's
> oldest opinion piece from 10,471 BC.  So far they've deciphered:
> 
>     SquareWheelWorld
>     ----------------
>     "Why the Round Wheel Will Fail"
>     by Zog Metcalf (inventor of the axel)
> 
> Hey Bob, give them a call, they're having some logic problems
> with the rest.
> 
> Kevin
> 
> PS  for those of you who aren't Bob Metcalf, he invented ethernet and
>     predicted the internet would "crash" about five years ago.  In
> addition
>     to wanting people to pay for poor s/w, he's keen to get people to pay
>     "tolls" on the net.  Generally he seems pretty grouchy lately, anyone
>     know the MIME type for Prozac?
> 
>