Posts by drekka

Malcolm will save us

Because it was he who said that we don't need fibre. He said our current copper wires are good enough. And they wonder why they are getting voted out everywhere.

Lost the plot

I cannot see this working. People these days don't want hard copies. Phone and small sized camera photos are generally emailed, not printed. Emailing something take a few seconds. Printing on paper, then hand delivering can take days and costs (relative to emailing) a lot.

More and more i thing the only people who want hard copies are those who want high quality canvases to put on walls or for other purposes such as posters. The images for these are not likely to be coming out out phones, no matter how good the cameras in them are.

I think Polaroid is really just a company with products which are no longer relevant and no ability to innovate.

My personal experience of years of "Cleaning" other people's code is that 49% is straight out bad design/code and people coding above their skill level. The next 49% is the poor slobs who get lumbered with the code being either too lazy to fix it, or not willing to call a spade a spade when talking to management.

I've lost track of the number of projects I've had dumped on me only to find undocumented, unreadable, over-engineered piles of poo. Some I've thrown out and re-written, some I've patched into shape over time.

The real skill is knowing that in a lot of cases, you can fix a lot of things by deleting more code than you will write.

I was on the front lines

Down here in Australia during the early 90's I was actively promoting OS/2. I helped to run a local user group, published a OS/2 magazine for users and developers nationwide and ran OS/2 stands at computer trade shows. I didn't know C++, but I was developing in REXX and Visual Basic. In my mind there was no comparison between OS/2 and Windows'95/NT. Compared to '95, OS/2 was everything MS had promised and failed to deliver. Compared to NT is was fast, hardware friendly and reliable. It even ran Windows programs better than MS Windows itself. So why didn't it take over the market like all the tech mags said it should?

I think it basically came down to marketing. MS has the experience of marketing mediocre produces to consumers, and like what is happening now with Apple (all be it with far superior products), they new that the consumer is the key to the enterprise. IBM on the other hand still lived in the 70's where people who wanted computers came to them. OS/2 marketing ... non-existant. Frankly, IBM could not sell it's way out of a paper bag and I suspect they still can't. Working in an IBM dealer for a while I also saw the way IBM handled it's own supply chain. Was not pretty.

Once I realised this I knew OS/2 would never win against Windows. I kept on with it for a while, but I could see the writing on the wall. Eventually I moved to linux and 3 years ago, to Mac. All I can say is that I love working with Macs. Mac OSX is the operating system that OS/2 could have become. It's not perfect, there's not such thing. But it's easy for the average person to use, reliable and has a UI that the Linux crew, despite valiant efforts, still cannot seem to get together. Windows ... well all I can say is that it's a great example of of a lack of clear vision.

It's not about the size

I think a lot of people tend to forget what made Apple great and many others fail. Apple is not about following others in other markets. It's about creating new and exiting products that create whole new markets. If Apple chooses to produce a smaller tablet, it won't be to compete with Amazon or anyone else, it will be because they have come up with something that others have missed, something that they think people will want.

Apple doesn't play catch up, Apple leads. That's how they went from nothing to everything in less than 10 years and that's why I switched to their products.