Serious Competition

[Victor Odhner]

Subject was:  "Re: Just in case you haven't seen this"
Thanks, Carl.  Definitely worth the read.  A few chuckles,
a little encouragement, but also a sobering reminder of
what business is all about:  Getting the customer's goals
met.

When it comes to program management, the Open Source movement
needs to learn from their opposition.  This part of the Valentine
letter is interesting:

 Finally, there's the Ameritrade team. Lloyd Arrow and team lost
 initially to Linux in the design phases by getting vetoed by the
 CIO, even after winning on all other merits. After several months
 of schedule slips trying to implement Linux, the Ameritrade CIO
 resigned. The account team was back at it with the new CIO and
 within a month were ready to deploy Ameritrade's most strategic
 apps, their Stream Quotes Servers, on Windows 2000.
 This is a key win and will expand from 5 servers to 100's
 of servers as the service is rolled out to all of Ameritrade's
 customers.

Think of ongoing per-server fees they will collect.  You have to
respect their selling ability, but letting the competition hang
themselves first is pretty effective.

The tattoo business is a little wierd -- this guy is scarey:

 Lloyd now has more body surface area saved to get that
 Windows tattoo he has always wanted!

Whoever set up the Largo systems should now be duly alerted.
Think they can respond in an "agile" manner to the enterprise
server issues that MS hopes to raise?  They'll have to be
on their toes.  Reminds me of this article from August:
"Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web?" by Ganesh Prasad.

 http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-08-13-009-20-OP

I have total respect for Microsoft for their ability to sell
their point of view, and to get a showcase solution into place.
They have gotten where they are through a coherent, ambitious
product and marketing strategy, and Open Source won't get past
the guerilla stage unless its practitioners are every bit as
focused and hungry.  It could be fun to watch.  And/or painful.

Vic