Messages in this thread | | | From | teamwork@freemail ... | Subject | Better Mousetraps | Date | Sat, 08 May 1999 10:22:20 GMT |
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John Fulmer <jfulmer@appin.org> sez :
"My reply in THIS thread was that Plan 9 was never a mainstream commercial sucess, and commending on Ken Thompson's use of the phrase "[Linux] will probably not be very suscessful"."
"I remember a lot of buzz in the mid 90's that Plan 9 was designed to be the next "Unix killer", and then the project got pulled. If you go through Bell Labs web pages on Plan 9, there is a comment that there is no on at Bell working on it, instead most members got pulled to Inferno, or other projects."
"AND I stated that my impression was that technically, Plan 9 was a very good and elegant system. It just didn't go anywhere."
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Plan-9 suffered the same fate as OS/2, NeXT, and BeOS. Despite the elegances and innovations of all the above products, they've flopped in the marketplace because they were wrongly positioned.
This is how they have been positioned:
IBM positioned OS/2 as "A Better Window than Windows";
Plan-9 was positioned as "Unix-NG";
NeXT was positioned as a "More Intuitive Mac"; and
BeOS tried to be a "Better Power-PC".
All of them have failed because they tried to be "Better Mousetraps."
Anyone studied Marketing 101 knows that the "Better Mousetrap" concept won't work if the "Old Mousetrap" has a significant following, and unfortunately, IBM, Bell-labs, NeXT and Be Corp have failed their Marketing 101.
One of the things that makes Linux popular is this:
Linux has never tried to be a "Better Version" of _anything_ that is currently in the marketplace.
Instead, Linux is a by-product of a social/cultural phenomenon.
People contributed to the development of Linux not because they want Linux to become a _better_ something, but they do it because they believe in themselves.
They believe that, own their own, they can create something that is _different_ - something that can stand on its own, no matter what the outside world throws at it.
It is that Spirit of Independence that attracts thousands of volunteers around the world.
It is therefore no surprise that Linus, - and many other kernel developers, - vehemently rejected repeated attempts to attach the "gnu" (or any other) label to Linux.
True, Linux _DID_ borrowed many ideas from other sources, including gnu, X-Free, *bsd, other *nixes, and yes, even from Ken Thompson's Plan-9. BUT, Linux is much, _much_ more than the sums of all the sources combined.
Without the developers who have spent many sleepless nights hacking away, without the many diversified supplementary projects such as dosemu, SAMBA and many others - some of them rather odd -that have sprung up around the kernel,Linux couldn't have become as significant as it is today.
Linux may be unix "compatible", but Linux isn't Unix. Linux may have components from FreeBSD, but it ain't *bsd either. Linux may be Motif, Posix, or any other alphabet-soup-thingy complianced, but it ain't gonna be restricted by any of them.
If anyone think they can "own" or even "tame" Linux, that fella is gonna be in a biggest surprise of his/her life.
In this ever-increasing conforming world we live in, the longer Linux can retain its independence and keep that uncompromized, non-comforming attitude, the more Linux will attract new talents to contribute in its development. Thus, the day Linux achieves its world-domination is the day Linux starts its decline.
Well, I hope that day will never come.
Sincerely, Pete teamwork@freemail.c3.hu
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