[wplug] [Advocacy] Re: My distro beat up your distro (yet again, sigh) -- Consumers

[Bryan J. Smith]

[ We're clearly moving off-topic and more into advocacy.  Is there an
off-topic/advocacy list? ]

On Mon, 2007-07-23 at 18:32 -0400, Zach wrote:
> It's sad the typical user/purchaser is so clueless they let Microsoft
> and the hardware manufacturers get away with this nonsense.

Consumers are responsible for their own decisions they make.  Yet they
wonder why and how Microsoft was able to obtain its near-monopoly?  They
wonder how Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect lost marketshare, even though
they outsold Microsoft Excel and Word on the retail shelf.  They don't
stop to realize its the distribution channel and product bundling.

Understand I was _not_ a big fan of the US v. Microsoft.  I think
consumers are the problem, not Microsoft.  And that's why I've always
put forth open standards (what I call Standardware), open source (what I
call Freedomware, or at least what I call Sourceware if there are IP
considerations), etc...  And I'm not against "proprietary" software
(what I call Commerceware) as long as it offers value -- repeat value
(which Microsoft intentional Hostageware does not).

But I'm an engineer.  I don't look at 2-3 years like a consumer, or like
a business accountant, or a business manager who is likely to be
promoted before I have to answer for my mistakes.  I have to look at
product lifecycle, including documentation, maintenance, etc..., for
more than 3 years -- typically 10+.  I don't have the luxury of ignoring
the issues I will have beyond 3 years.  And that's why I _never_ used MS
Office, _never_ used any "Chicago" based Windows 95/98, and moved away
from NT after 4.0.

I moved from Lotus SmartSuite to StarOffice 3.0 (on Windows) in the
mid-'90s.  Not only did virtually all my Ami Pro 3 documentation convert
(StarOffice 3.0 was one of the few converters), and _all_ of my
documentation written over the last 12 years is still readable.
Especially when I did make the full jump to Linux in 1998 and StarOffice
4.0 (which ran on Linux).

For more typeset, I use LyX (LaTeX).  I've moved more into Scribus as of
late.  I need long-term editing with verbatim reproduction.  I can't
even get long-term editing with MS Word -- when I lost _all_ of my
templates and _most_ of my documentation when one company forced me from
Word 95 to Word 97, I openly refused and that was that.

For hardware, I investigate what works and what doesn't.  I like to buy
true hardware peripherals, which often doesn't cost much more.  E.g., I
bought a brand new, direct from Dell, 3100cn (which they don't make any
more) -- which is a $325 Postscript Level 3 Color Laser Printer with a
300MHz RISC chip and 320MB of RAM (base 64MB that takes a standard PC133
SO-DIMM).  You just have to wait for the really good deals.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith         Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org   http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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        Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution