Before you think of being a do-gooder...

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 12:43:58PM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
> The public demands new and exciting in every field, not just IT.
> 
> Beyond the relatively small segment of bleeding-edge early adopters, the 
> public (using your definition) generally wants stuff that works, and in 
> my experience fears change more than craves it. There are still plenty 
> of shops still using Win98 and NT because they believe that the warts 
> they have are less than the warts they will encounter by upgrading.
> 
> OpenOffice is an example of something that's not new and exciting. It's 
> popular now because it solves certain problems and costs less, even 
> though it arguably has fewer features than its proprietary counterparts. 
> That is an example of what the public is demanding.
> 
> Contrast this to the tech fashion inflicted by vendors, such as the 
> current geekism-du-jour, virtualization. This is a creation of vendors 
> to address a problem that doesn't exist for most people -- yet 
> Microsoft, Novell and Red Hat seem to agree that we need it. Most 
> businesses can't keep *one*  OS under control, now vendors are telling 
> them they need to run multiple environments PLUS the supervisor system 
> that runs it all.
> 
> Most tech users aren't pushing for virtualization, or 
> software-as-a-service, or locked cellphones, or upgrade subscription 
> plans. These are all things that benefit vendors, who then try to market 
> it all as end-user features and hope that either trust or dependence 
> will close the sale.

Imagine if you could have the hypervisor start a special game OS just to
run your games, and then if the game screws up, you just kill of that
partition, but your main OS and applications are not affected.  That
would be neat.  Not sure if it will happen, but I do think
virtualization support in the hardware gives some interesting
posibilities.

For developers it can be very useful to be able to boot a seperate
system while debuging something, without having to have a seperate
machine to do it on, while keeping your development environment up.

Software as a service on the other hand, I see less potential in.
People don't like having to continuously spend money on things.  They
complain enough about gas and insurance as it is.  If they had to keep
paying to use their car too, well that would be kind of like leasing...
Never mind.  Maybe people are that crazy after all. :)

Len Sorensen
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