From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Wed Mar 15 2000 - 20:09:47 PST
For those that don't get the subject: reference, cf:
http://www.naggum.no/worse-is-better.html
For some years now, I've been informally keeping a kind of mental list of
technically-superior "losering" technologies and their successful competitors.
I guess I've always hoped to discern patterns in all of this, so that I can
avoid making those same kinds of mistakes. (Note: I certainly don't think
there's ONE failure pattern, but perhaps there are metapatterns of failure...)
Anyone care to contribute to this list, or correct it?
The format here is better but loser / worse but winner / category. In no
particular order, a partial list:
* Beta / VHS / consumer video formats
* Colecovision / Nintendo 8-bit / second-generation game consoles
* Inmos' Transputer / SPARC / first widely-deployed RISC architectures
* Objective C / C++ / workday OOP languages
* 68XXX / Intel / consumer PC chip architectures
* Linda / message passing (i.e. CORBA) / distributed computing paradigms
* NeWS / X11 / distributed window systems
* ATV / HDTV / advanced television formats
* Scheme / Pascal / pedagogic programming languages
* Smalltalk / Java / portable VM-based OOP languages
* Macintosh / Windows / ditto operating systems
* NeXT / Windows / ditto
* peer-to-peer buddy lists / client-server buddy lists / buddy lists
* Newton / Palm / early runs at PDA fence
* BeOS / Linux / new-gen OSes (don't start with me! ;-)
* capabilities / public key crypto / comm. security paradigms
* Plan 9 / Linux / new gen OSes (again, don't start with me! ;-)
* Inferno / Java / portable "virtual operating systems" (in some sense)
* UnterMUD / ad-hoc solutions / distributed MUDs
* MOO / Mush / MUDs
* QNX / VxWorks / realtime, embeddable OSes
* anything else / SMTP / asynchronous message transport
* anything else / HTTP / synchronous request-reponse
* anything else / Perl / network "glue" programming
* CMDA-TDMA-etc / GSM / domestic cell standards
* Wankel rotary engine / standard combustion engine / motors
etc. etc.
Contributions much appreciated.
jb
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