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I
won't argue with it because I think you are essentially right. But you
don't have to
go to
Longhorn to find an example. To sweeten land for crops (to follow a
directed ecology metaphor), one learns to rotate and leave fallow.
One
also learns some land is better and can be made better for certain crops
by
fertilization, mulching, and so on. One knows that too much of this or
done
at the wrong time is wasteful or poisonous. One learns that spraying
is
faster and cheaper but has the risks of damaging adjacent properties and
people. In other words, there are reasons big farms dominate
farming and big
companies run them, and that farming cooperatives are the other approach.
Size
matters when systems are dense and interconnected. It's a management
issue.
To
leave metaphor and enter the real world of the software market, it means that
the
companies like Microsoft, instead of co-opting a business domain, begin to
study
market segments and develop strategies that enable those domains to
work
better, either in isolation or in concert. An example would be the
one
I
pointed out for public safety: RAIN. (gotta love how well that works
on
farmland: too little, crops die if too large a field; too much,
they drown).
By
enabling the backbone as such and taking care of the problems of
interagency intercourse while we work the problems of discourse,
they
solve a technical problem for us which we
can
solve ourselves, but which would take a long time, much expense,
and
which will likely favor a single market vendor's solution. They use
their
clout
over the land to do something which not only helps our business
but
which helps our customers. They don't take over the market; they
enable
it. Keep reading though because if one makes the leap to
''embrace extend and extinguish" one makes a step too far because
as you
point out, they need the market software experts and they cannot
afford
to hire them all. In other words, Microsoft sucks at content.
Always has. They can target it like they have games, but they still
tend
to trip over their own all too expensive cultural tennis shoes.
IBM
did that too when they were the BigEvilOnes.
The
problem I find with the MS-must-die crowd is that it is just noise without
solutions.
It
doesn't help anyone, and I think it actively hurts those who follow it.
It
makes MS the bad guy when they might be the good guy (situational
and I
am not naive about MS), it keeps people from understanding the
patterns of BigCo behavior so the naive party ends up anointing yet
another BigCo without realizing it, and in the end, it takes away the
flexibility of the individual by substituting one boss (the BigCo) for
another boss (the Herd). It leads to the self-immolating behaviors
such as
seems
to be the case with Dave Winer when to prevent co-opting,
he
co-opted (See: The Devil and Daniel Webster).
Demonizing is just politics and not very smart politics at
that.
Sharecropping worked as long as the sharecropper was free to move
on,
but it meant the sharecropper was responsible for taking their own
resources and targeting well that move. What made
sharecropping
evil
(a simple word for an easily predicted result) was when the resources
allotted by the land owner always equaled or bested the resources derived
(in
coal mining, "I owe my soul to the company store"). A sharecropper
is not
a slave or a serf, but unless they are paying attention, the effects
can be
the same. What must not happen (and as an American Southerner,
I've
seen this one up close), is that the environment in which they
exist
(say existing laws) must not reinforce the tendency to tie the
person
to the land. It cannot be the case that to farm, one must own
a John
Deere. So, and it seems trivial to state here, standards of
technology, and like it or not, standards of
behavior.
Like
the Google interface, they are as effective as the user is
smart.
len
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