RE: Icon

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

It's not so much a conspiracy as Parkinson's Law.  They
don't have to make the product any better than it has to
be to prevent people from switching to something else. 

Where this model of doing things runs into a wall is
server-based apps.  If MSFT wants to host apps, they're
going to have to figure out how to make them efficient,
because they're going to be paying for the hardware.


--- Scott McKay <swm@hotdispatch.com> wrote:
> At 04:41 PM 12/20/01, Anton van Straaten wrote:
> 
> >Add historical reasons, and economic reasons, to that list.  Related
> to both
> >of these, is legacy code.
> 
> Ah, this is off-topic, but what the heck.  Just delete it.
> 
> It sounds a bit like a conspiracy theory, but I think there is a
> strong
> economic incentive against large companies like Microsoft using good
> languages and tools.  If they use poorer languages and tools, then
> they can use them in their armament of excuses for why they ship
> relatively crummy software whose quality improves only slowly.  The
> incentive to continue this practice is that they get to ship ever
> more,
> and ever larger, releases of their software, which their customers
> get to pay for again and again.  This is great for companies like MS
> because it guarantees a revenue stream.  And it's great for companies
> that produce CPUs, memory, and disks, because the ever expanding
> software requires ever expanding hardware resources, requiring people
> to upgrade their hardware every few years.
> 
> I think it's worth trying to do language design, but the economic
> forces
> are *huge*, even if you don't buy the above "emergent conspiracy".
> Even if it is good for nothing else, Linux shows how economic forces
> can be undermined...
> 
> ----------
> It's amazing for me to remember just how much functionality we put
> into Lisp machines 15 years ago, machines which typically had about
> 10 to 12 megabytes of memory and 300 megabytes of disk, which
> typically held a couple of "world loads", big paging files, and a
> file
> system.  And the same goes for Xerox D-machines, which were,
> I think, even smaller.  (I still use my c. 1990 Lisp machine at home
> to do real work, and it doesn't even feel like a nostalgia exercise.)
> 


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