Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!amdcad!ames!ncar!tank!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!urbsdc!aglew
From: aglew@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The NeXT Problem
Message-ID: <28200212@urbsdc>
Date: 15 Oct 88 20:34:00 GMT
Article-I.D.: urbsdc.28200212
References: <26435@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Lines: 48
Nf-ID: #R:ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU:26435:urbsdc:28200212:000:1830
Nf-From: urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM!aglew    Oct 15 15:34:00 1988


>Standardize and Speed-Up -> Increase sales.
>
>		Chris  Perleberg
>		pchris@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu

Well, I don't like writing this, since I believe in standardization,
but may I point up some obvious corollaries?:

- Standardize and speed-up (but speed up a bit more slowly
  than your competitors) => lost sales and customer migration

- Standardize and speed-up (but choose the wrong area to work
  on future development, eg. providing bubble memory cards
  instead of new floppies) => lost sales and customer
  migration.

- Avoid standards and speed-up => increase sales (but maybe
  not as much as you could have if you standardized, unless
  your performance is overwhelmingly better.)

- Avoid standards and fail to speed up => customer loss,
  but more slowly than they would have if you standardized.

- Standardize and speed-up, plus have a few proprietary features
  that are really attractive to use => increase sales, gain
  customers from other systems, and then "trap" them on your
  system.

Can anyone guess why POSIX is such an incomplete standard,
and what strategy the big vendors are going to try to use?



Andy "Krazy" Glew. 
at: Motorola Microcomputer Division, Champaign-Urbana Development Center
    (formerly Gould CSD Urbana Software Development Center).
mail: 1101 E. University, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
email: (Gould addresses will persist for a while)
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