Re: For the AdaOS folks

[Adrien Plisson <aplisson-news@stochastique.net>]

Wes Groleau wrote:
> or anyone else with similar ambitions.
> 
> Read "Kill the operating System"
> page 32 of September 2003 Technology Review
> 
> Not a prescription, but something to think about.
> 

This is a nice article.

he could also go a LOT further: most people are running PCs, a computer 
architecture dating from an old age of computing. did anyone thought of 
a newer architecture ?

the interresting thing is : we can all think about it, but we also ARE 
ABLE TO DO IT. the concept of applications working together has been 
successfully treated (see Oberon <http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/>), the 
concept of another way of organizing files has been implemented (see 
TheBrain <http://www.thebrain.com/>), and many other new ideas already 
exist that this article does not cover...

so where is the problem ? why do we still use those weird old computing 
standards when we could have much much more ?

the answer is in the text: "Computing’s standard model owes its success 
to the economics of the computer industry". people are investing in 
development. they don't want to lose their investment, so they target 
what is widely used: game vendors target the windows market, cobol 
compiler vendors target the mainframe market... so we are in an infinite 
loop: game vendors target windows because game players owns most windows 
systems, but game players buys windows systems because it is easier to 
find a good game running on windows. and what about macintosh owners ? 
they CAN'T play recent games (quake II was released on macintosh only 
when quake III came out on windows). we are stuck with this model until 
someone is kind enough to take some risks.

so do investors never take any risk ?

yes they do. sometimes something really new, something revolutionnary 
comes out. it exists for some time, then disappear (see BeOS). those 
thing so not disappear because their ideas are bad, no. they disappear 
because people don't want to change: they don't want to risk investing 
in something new. they wait and see if it really is worth the 
investment. so investors that invested in the develoment of the new 
ideas don't get any return, the idea fails on the market, the investors 
abandon the idea, the idea disappear.

and then people say: "i was right not investing in this new idea: it 
disappeared !". what they don't understand is that it disappeared 
BECAUSE they did not invest in it.

so how to change this ? how to get new ideas accepted by all ? this is 
the real question to ask...

-- 
rien