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Re: Perception is Barrier to Open Source Market Acceptance

Linonut wrote:
> After takin' a swig o' grog, Rex Ballard belched out this bit o' wisdom:

[snip SunOS 4.0 vs Windows 3.1 to Windows XP in mission critical
situations]

> That one was a real laugher.  A Billy-box taking over for a Sun box!
>
> Luckily, Microsoft was able to snowjob a lot of people into believing it
> while they struggled to make it happen.
>
> The bargain-basement "addict 'em" and "lock 'em in" prices helped, too.

One of Bill Gates key moments was when he realized that he needed to do
to businesses what drug dealers did to young teenagers.  He needed to
get these businesses and OEMs so addicted to Microsoft software that
they couldn't imagine living without it and the withdrawal symptoms
would making quitting an unbearable thought.

Bill called an old drug dealer buddy of his from Harvaard, Steve
Ballmer, and told Steve the plan.  Ballmer was intrigued, and actually
managed to execute the plan brilliantly using the exact same technique
that had been used by coke dealers to get upper middle class white kids
addicted to powder cocaine.

> > To this day, nearly 14 years later, Windows XP has still failed to come
> > anywhere near fulfilling that promise.  They have YET to deliver a
> > system that provides the performance, reliability, security, stability,
> > flexibility, and performance of even SunOS, let alone Solaris 10, AIX
> > 5.3, or SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 10.
>
> Consumers generally like it, though, even if it misbehaves now and then.

Actually, consumers hate it!  Ask anyone who has used windows if they
LIKE Windows, and they will almost unanimously say "NO, It's a PAIN".

When it's working the way it was designed to work, and the user has
control of the machine, Windows XP is quite pleasant, even tolerable.
The problem is that this is a very small percentage of the time.

Within minutes of powering up the system, the machine starts acting
like it's demonically possessed.  You have pop-ups and flash images
trying to take control of you mouse and keyboard even when you are
nowhere near the image being displayed.  You have spyware sending your
confidential informaton, accounts, passwords, and financial records to
god-knows-where, you have e-mails that want to phish for direct access
to your paypal, checking, savings, and credit card accounts (including
banks where you don't even have accounts).  You have attachments that
look like MS-Office documents but contain macroviruses along with
legitimate macros, and proceed to wreak havoc all over your hard drive
and any shares you have access to.  You have Microsoft automated
updates that warn you that if you don't reboot within minutes you will
be attacked by a hundred thousand worms, viruses, and gremlins.  And
then there is that wonderful new security update that tries to remove
all your favorite 3rd party applications because they are "Viruses" or
"Trojans".

In in the few seconds per minute when YOU actually have control of your
computer, you start doing something in a spreadsheet that you are
trying to get updated before the next onslaught of deamons attacks (yes
I spelled it right), and suddenly you have a dancing paper clip making
all kinds of wierd noises and insisting that you get help immediately.

You want to find a file that you created and sent to 50 people a month
ago and end up watching a stupid dancing dog while your hard drive
chugs along for up to an hour (as the pop-ups and animations fill
what's left of your screen).  Just as you are almost done, one of the
pop-ups you are trying to kill in your game of "bop the beaver" is so
close to the search window that you kill that instead (and by the way,
you also killed that spreadsheet you were trying to finish before lunch
too.

But Billwg will tell you that people LOVE Windows.

According to Billwg

They loved Windows 3.1, especially when the General Protection Fault
message would come up and their word document that they had been
editing for an hour disappeared, never to be found again.

They loved Windows NT, especially when, for no good reason, they
suddenly saw a screen filled with interesting data that turned out to
be meaningless to anyone (including Microsoft) but pretty much said "We
have just lost all of the files you have edited for the last 2 hours,
all of the web pages you had spend hours searching to find, and there
is a very good chance that you will be unable to reboot your computer,
I hope you backed up your 10 gigabyte hard drive to 8,000 floppies.
Have a nice day.

They loved Windows 95/98, especially when they went to check their bank
account and found that all their money was gone, because the guy in the
apartment next door (who has since left the country) accessed the $C
drive as "Admin" and used the account codes to send himself a series of
$24 dollar charges.

They loved Windows XP when they went and purchased additional memory
and a bigger hard drive and suddenly Windows refuses to install in this
OEM licensed computer because the call to the "mother ship" has
indicatetd that piracy has occurred.

They loved it when NOT ONLY did XP crash and refuse to reboot, but
after they reimaged their drive for the third time that year, Microsoft
refused to allow them to reinstall it until they paid a substantial sum
of money for a new "Legal" license.

Yeah, people just love Windows, and according to Billwg, they'll love
Vista even more.

I can't wait.

NOT!!!


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