From: Mark Day (markday@cisco.com)
Date: Sun Sep 10 2000 - 21:55:30 PDT
> > While I don't agree with Gabriel in all his points, it's still a
> > compelling argument in its most abstract form. The list is endless:
> > Lisp, Colecovision, Beta, Objective C, the Mac, the Transputer, Linda,
> > Smalltalk, the Atari ATW boxes, Cogent Research, NeXT, etc. etc. etc.
> > Best-of-breed tech is *never* top market leader. Why?
>
> Because they aren't best-of-breed. None of those ever were. The problem
> is that many people don't know how to value technology, not that the
> winners have somehow lesser value. All designs have trade-offs. People
> who bemoan the fate of a good design typically just ignore all of
> the negative trade-offs that came with it.
I also suspect there's some of the same psychology that was involved with
one of my friends who liked obscure bands. As soon as a band was successful
in reaching a larger audience, it was a "sell-out". The virtues of
underdogs were exaggerated, and the failings of the dominant players were
similarly exaggerated.
Maybe there's an alternate universe where everyone runs transputer-based
systems and some alternate version of Jeff is complaining that the long-gone
x86 was a much better system.
--Mark
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Sep 10 2000 - 21:40:30 PDT