Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

Respect Your Competition - Respect Your Customers

A young athlete was sent to represent his home town in a competition.  He wasn't the favorite to win, there was another runner who was supposedly better.  When he returned to his home town after the race was over, he was asked about the results of the competition, he said: “The other guy was much better than me.  He was better prepared, he was as strong as a lion, as light as a gazelle and as swift as an eagle.  He moved like a light beam.  I hardly beat him”.

A colleague and friend, Jim Grisanzio of Tokyo, recently wrote a short posting in his blog about Linus Torvalds referring to Sun's Solaris OS as “Buggy Piece of Crap”.  (http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/linus_and_solaris_bugs)  I was immediately intrigued.  For starters I thought it was an error on the part of my distinguished friend.  It was impossible, I thought, for a person of Linus Torvalds' stature to speak in such low language.  He must have said something like faulty, insufficient, inadequate, inappropriate, obsolete or something like that, but crappy?  No way Jose.

So, as I always do, I hit the Web.  I was wrong.  To my great disbelief (and disappointment I must say) I realized that Mr. Torvalds, the Father of Linux, He Whose Name We Speak with Great Respect, uses that kind of language on occasion, and Solaris is not the only victim.

Torvalds: "MacOS X - Crap" (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/06/macos_x_is_crap_torvalds/)
Torvalds: "Open source without commercial interest = crap" (http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9758240-16.html)
Torvalds: "Solaris is a buggy piece of crap" (http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/linus_and_solaris_bugs)

And these are not isolated events, it would seem.  C++ was also mentioned in this context and a few other issues as well.

What does this have to do with folk stories? Simple.  When you want to be number one, you have to have worthy competition.  What's the point in being number one when your competition is, well... crappy?  What's the great accomplishment in beating a “buggy piece of crap”?  And the most interesting thing is that no, Solaris is not a @$%^^ piece of $%#&, and Linux isn't number one...  IBM and Intel chose to OEM Solaris for a reason, for many reasons.  Customers demand it, and IBM and Intel respect their customers and the choices they make.

Better yet.  When you talk to your possibly future customers, is it wise to tell them: “you guys are so incredibly stupid.  You have been working for years, successfully running your businesses on a buggy piece of crap, why don't you switch over”?  In my humble opinion a better message to one's potential customers would be: “The other platform is really good.  In fact, it's excellent.  But we are better.  We can offer you much more.  In performance, support, stability, recovery, well, everything.  Use our product and you won't regret it".  Respect is the name of the game.  Respect your competition, respect your customers, respect yourself.  Disrespect your competition, and you end up disrespecting yourself and your customers at the same time.

To the point, we can probably argue for eons about which OS is better.  There will be a lot of data, and even more analysis.  But the conclusion will always be rather vague.  I ran across the following article.  It's long, and covers a lot of ground.  Even its conclusions page is way long.  Yet, I suggest you read it nonetheless, the conclusions will be clear to you very quickly: http://www.softpanorama.org/Articles/solaris_vs_linux.shtml

So there you have it: Linux is really good, and I personally admire Linus Torvalds, he is a living legend.  But Solaris is much better.  Download it and try it at http://www.opensolaris.org/os/downloads/.  You won't regret it.

Posted at 08:57AM Sep 25, 2007 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[3]