Ware Ware Wizardjin ...

[Marcus J. Ranum]

tb at Materna.DE (Torsten Beyer) writes:
>[...] Although they get slower, in certain cases harder to use, this is
>what a lot of customers want.
>Any idea of how to bring such people back to the right way ?

	Make your software conceptually and intellectually consistent,
with a simple user interface, and make it faster and cheaper than the
glitz pink Cadillacs, and it might sell. The "gotcha" here is that there
are many, many customers who won't even look at something that doesn't
run under [insert your favorite bloated window thing].

	Basically, what we're talking here is a counter-revolution. We
are facing the same kind of situation that the american automobile
industry faced: features VS performance and reliability. Someone, some
day, is going to play the role of Honda and produce cheap, effective,
and reliable code in a commodity-mode. How many perfectly good applications
have you seen crash because of interactions with stupidities in window
managers? I don't know of any studies, but my intuition is that simple
code is not only faster, it is more reliable. N-d widgets increase the
bugginess of window managers proportionally to N. ;)  (wait for the 4-d
widgets and the "backing temporal store" X extension).

	The way to bring people back to the "right way" is to be cheaper,
better, faster, and to protect users investments in hardware by allowing
it to support MORE software without an upgrade. Would I be able to sell
a product that implemented 60% of the functionality of "foo" but cost
less, was less buggy, and could support twice as many concurrent users
as "foo" without requiring a hardware upgrade? The gotcha is if "foo" is
a standard and a FIPS and all that...


mjr.
--
	"I don't care if my lettuce has DDT on it - as long as it's crisp"
		Jorma Kaukonen