From: Eirikur Hallgrimsson (eh@mad.scientist.com)
Date: Wed Jul 12 2000 - 11:34:31 PDT
This is all fallout from the broken strategy of 'design by
acquisition.' Buyouts look good to corporate managers for some
reason, but from the engineering perspective they always seem to
eventually involve more work than doing the right development. I
can't tell you how many times I have watch this, or had to live
with it. You can't get enough development spending approved, so
they do a buyout, which ends up costing more than your original plan,
by the time that you get it to market. (Copeland). Clearly this means
that cost estimates around buyouts are always unrealistic, unless
there is to be no engineering work at all. Why is this so?
It looks very possible to me that Apple will completely lose their
'totally integrated' advantage due to this shotgun wedding, despite
the fact that they are producing attractive demos. It remains to be
seen if anyone outside of their captive customer base (installed
base) will buy it, or whether it can survive in the business world.
Microsoft could end up on top of the integrated user experience heap.
Linux is coming. I just installed the KDE 2.0 alpha binaries,
complete with Koffice which stores documents in open XML formats.
KDE2 is really nice. It would not be at all hard for KDE to exceed
Mac usability meaning that Apple would really be in trouble given
that MS won't stand still, and Linux is free.
Eirikur
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jul 12 2000 - 11:50:56 PDT