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About that Job, BillCopyright 1999, Dean R. Pannell
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News item: VA Linux goes public, market value tops $10 Billion
I want to talk to you about that job, Bill. Is it OK if I call you Bill? You've been in my life forever. I feel like we're old friends. Sure, I've been swimming with the penguins lately, but I haven't forgotten all you've done for me. In that light, I'd like to offer you a little bit of free help. Bill, that job description misses the mark in a big way. All this technical analysis and strategic positioning stuff. Gimme a break, mon. Try to remember the days before you put the Bill in Billionaire, when your only Monopoly was on a shelf in the closet. It's déjà vu all over again, but now you're on the wrong side.
I was a glass-house IT (we called it MIS back then) guy when the IBM PC came out and got everyone's attention. I had banged a little basic on a Trash-80 and dinked with my friend's’ Vic-20’s and Commodore 64’s, but this was very, very different. That IBM nameplate and those Charlie Chaplin ads pushed a lot of boxes. Nobody pretended it was a technical milestone, but it said IBM, it had an open architecture and it started to show up everywhere.
The old hands at work barely tolerated the little things. OK for typing memos, OK as terminals for using REAL computers, but no good for real work. Thing is, the little buggers were fun. Mainframes were work. PCs, Microsoft OS and all, were fun. More than that, they were cool.
PCs didn't have 20,000 applications. They had accessible development tools and a horde of enthusiastic hackers. You sold us MASM by the ton and Borland peddled Turbo Pascal. We had C compilers at every price point from free to “Say what?” People shared code, magazines published it. Those of us on Compuserve and its kin began talking and putting up programs. Remember that, Bill? Does that sound familiar? Can you imagine how powerful the Internet makes that process?
People who worked on behemoths all day went home, fired up Turbo Pascal, or Quick C or whatever and had fun. We tried out our pet ideas. Some of us gave them away, some of us made a little money. Some made a whole big pile. As I recall, that helped sell a lot of computers and a lot of other software that made you a great big pile of money.
The real revelation was Lotus 1-2-3. Corporate departments learned how to do their work with spreadsheet macros and bypass the IT guys altogether. No more waiting 6 months or a year and spending a bazillion dollars to get what the IT guys decided was best. Better yet, it flew under the IT radar, tucked neatly within managers’ purchase authority limits. Does that sound like any Samba servers you know? In corporationland, PCs became the weapons of go-getters and mavericks. Technical merit? Please! Hard drives were fragile, you couldn't audit the spreadsheets , and backup was a joke. But – you could get results without breaking the budget. The glass house crew became bad guys, dinosaurs.
IBM didn't help. The company that invented the term “PC didn't understand them. They gave us PS/2/Microchannel/OS/2 in an effort to establish a proprietary high-margin standard. (Stop snickering about OS/2, Bill. IBM may be on the verge of getting you back for that one.) The IBM products really were technically impressive. They got clobbered. Too expensive and misdirected. IBM paid more attention to its strategic plans than to its customers. While IBM was protecting its minicomputers, Compaq introduced the Compaq 386 and blew everyone away. The leadership mantle shifted and Compaq became a force. Compaq computers were cheaper AND better (well, who needed all that microchannel stuff, anyway). They were cool.
Which finally brings us to Linux. Linux is good technology and is perceived that way. It does the job. This is bad news for you, Bill. You've become the new 1980’s IBM, the epitome of uncool. You can't win merely by trotting out better technology (assuming you can). Linux is cool. You are the establishment.
It's not a technical question. To illustrate: We have a nice little network (including Win95 and a WinNT ThinkPad). We've got file, print, e-mail, web, and database servers. We have productivity tools, and more development tools than you can shake a stick at . Couldn't do it with your stuff, Bill. You have the technology. We don't have the money. When I help my church out or help others, Linux is what I know. I can't propose Microsoft solutions because I don't have the infrastructure. It doesn't matter a lick to me how good NT is. Linux does the job. I can afford it. It empowers me. Sound familiar?
Bill, the job you need done is not comparing Windows and Linux tit for tat. It's not making Windows “better” than Linux. You've got to sift through your proprietary snafus, your license-takebacks and price increases to figure out where you've protected Microsoft more than your customers. You've got to figure out how to make your stuff cool again, make Windows the platform of choice for the young hotshots who will be tomorrow's business leaders. Killer products don't come from bar charts and business plans. They come from the kind of bright minds and big dreams that look at someone like VA Linux and say “I can do that.”
That's what you need, if you've got the stomach for it. Believe me, it won't be easy.
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If you haven't read Linuxworld Hangover, Part 2., check it out!