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which is why farmers worship at the temple monsanto.....
in case you forget this is not the only industry plagued by a large,
aggressive, monopolistic player
and personally i think we are poorer for it
rick
On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 00:38, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> 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
> From: AndrewWatt2000@aol.com [mailto:AndrewWatt2000@aol.com]
>
> If there is a logical case to avoid Longhorn then, in my view,
> Tim fails to make it. Perhaps he would like to try to make a
> stronger case.
>
> Andrew Watt
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