Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1998 02:17:19 -0500 From: Lanny Baron <beef@cybertouch.org> To: grog@FreeBSD.ORG, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: re:Greg Lehey's Essay: Who's in control? Message-ID: <364939FB.72948337@cybertouch.org>
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The essay Greg wrote can be found on http://www.lemis.com/x/unix-way-2.html Hello Greg, Well I have some comments about your Feedback Page. One thing that hit me fast and hard was a fact you stated. That is, alot of people drive, most however are not racing car drivers. If we take that to the world of computers, then the same rule applies. I enjoy driving my car. The limit on the highway is 100kph and I do 180kph. What does that mean (besides breaking the law)? I like things fast, easy and fun. Not to mention challenging. In the computer world, there are many times (due to my so-badly-wanting-to-know-all about the workings of FreeBSD) that I like the challenge. But then there is the side of me that likes to have "fun". Use the computer for ease of work. Now lets take this example with your experience with Excel or Word. Both those programs can be extremely hard to use. But then, the IMPORTANT part is there. The GUI. The eye candy that made billy boy the richest kid on the block. That one thing..the GUI...is what is in control. It's in control because the media has dictated it. The fact that you had or desired to learn Emacs or Xemacs is the same to a great extent as one who wants to learn to use Excel, Word, Access...there may be a lot of point and click, but you MUST know what you are doing to produce intelligible work. Not to mention useable work. I will return to the above in a minuet or two. With respect to a program like IBM's voice. I found it useless. (anyone out there want to teach me how to use it..it cant spell too good) That is like the now available (so i am told) coffee machine in which you say "coffee" and it begins to brew. Well are we now talking that we may as well loose the use of our hands, arms and legs? I rather doubt it. And yes there are many dead heads that like coming home from a hard day at the factory, beat the wife and kids, get drunk and go on their favorite news group (alt.binaries.sex..blah) and do intelligent work..maybe they are studying gynecology. Those users would think ls -a = lick, suck -all over. So to those that want to constantly run their cars on cruise control ....need not apply. On or back to the real problem. As Greg knows, I recently discovered in a discussion with Greg that there is a program or suite of programs which can turn a FreeBSD machine, into a move over NT and Novell, THE MACHINE IS HERE. I am 100% sure that there are even more programs like that in nature that make Unix OS's untouchable by the boys at Micro$oft. The problem as I see it and have stated it, is not that Emacs may be too difficult to learn to use. ( I don't know any Unix program that is like Excell..that means I..not that it doesnt exist) Or that creating spread sheets is undoable. The one single problem is ... MARKETING. I wonder if anyone out there in the FreeBSD community has undertaken to find out what makes a person buy a system like NT. Lets face it. The costs for a 15 user Novell system with Group Wise ..no hardware..is between $12,000.00 and $15,000.00. That is for licenses, software and installation. I am trying to get into this market and can charge a ton less. But then that's NOT the point either. It goes back to the same argument. The control Greg speaks of. It's the marketing, which lead to the final purchase, training and all the other goodies that come with those systems. Including the wad of cash you must be prepared to fork out. My proof of what I have said came to me yesterday. My future brother in law, who works for a fair size network company came to my condo. Only a month ago when on a friday night dinner at my g/f's (we ..all 40 of us..every friday) parents apt. were again talking about systems. He claims (now its claimed :-) that i was using the cart and horse..while the rest of the world was into the modern technology brought by Novell and then Micro$oft. (He did point out that NT is pure shit by the way) When I wanted to show him the Gui part of FreeBSD he simply said "that's nice..Unix is starting to get closer...he said "where is the file server" I thought he mean an ftp site like ftp.freebsd.org. Boy was I wrong. So after explaing to me what a file server does. I told him I would find out and after speaking to our MENTOR Greg Lehey, I was pointed in the right direction. So ...back to yesterday. He came over. I sat him down on my windoze box. (sorry to insult any of you) He logged in the windoze box with his username password and domain. Bing...up comes a box on the top left saying logging in to Windows NT. But wait..I don't have windoze NT. He went to network neiborhood and say all my pcs. Just like on a Nt or Novell Network. I then let him see with a multi PC controller that in fact there was NO wintoes NT or Novell. But there was FreeBSD (freedom and freedom2 wired and mrsmith) I told him to do a find (not find / -name) in wintows for winword.exe and a find for winamp.exe on my local drives. There was none to be found. So he knew that I did not have those binaries on my pc's. I told him to click on the top on the Icon for Word. He did. He opened a document from My Documents (of course, sitting on a FreeBSD box). He looked at me like ....lanny WTF??? He then ran to my sons room and logged in on mrsmsith with a different username and password. Did the same thing and when he opened the same document he saw that a box came up telling him the file was already opened. And that he could have a copy. He exclaimed...Lanny last month you did not know what a file server was and now you have a full blown file server and network. I said "if you say so...thats why I called you here." He said this was incredible. Now skipping a pile of stuff. The downside. He said that if he were to walk into a client and tell them about FreeBSD or my own...Freedom Networks..the persons who decide on buying from him would more than likely NOT pick FreeBSD. Why? He said because no one knows what or who FreeBSD is. Again, that comes down to the control. The controlling factor here is not the learning curve. For as many of you know, there are tons of schools offering (for a handsome fee) on how to use Excel, C, Word and so on. But I know of none to teach Emacs, SS or SC what ever you called that spread sheet. Not to mention a school for DNS, Apache, and so on. But then, schools want students. Students want jobs, and many jobs want you to know ms or novell products. In essence what I am saying is, that yes, an air head will continue a life of air headiness. And people who are serious in there jobs will work hard at it. But at the same time, those users like ease of use. At least in there minds those menu after menu is easier than doing /usr/local/sbin/dhcpc -interface de0 (and possibly an ton of flags that i don't know) Where as if the person knows they need dhcpc and then the menu's pop up for the flags and the device to apply them too...then you are in the same light as that to which they are now accustomed to and like. And more times than not, the user who is pretty good will find out they can do the same on a command line much quicker than by a menu driven system. Don't take this as a blow to FreeBSD. Rather as an imput to where I think FreeBSD should try to put some attention to. And of course, a great deal of attention to marketing. Regards.... Lanny Baron To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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