Eccentric Flower talk:201008/Parachutes Lawyers Wintel and China

---

Danima:

The blind side of the Wintel article comes through most clearly, I think, in this sentence:

I know it's a throw-away sentence, but to characterize Oracle's purchase of Sun as being about Oracle acquiring a (relevant) "computer-maker" rather than the sponsorship of both Java and MySQL suggests that the example was back-fit into the thesis of increasing vertical integration.

Also, HELLO, Google is making its play for business computing every bit as much -- and more effectively -- than any peep that's I've heard from either Cisco or IBM lately.

I wish I had more to say about your presentation of the "virtuous race to the bottom" argument, here, other than that it's not the first time I've heard it (by decades), nor the first time that it's left me with a bad taste in my mouth that I can't quite identify.

-- 00:55, 4 August 2010 (BST)

---

Bunny42:

"business progresses through creative destruction,"

It's a dog-eat-dog world, out there. I take it as a given that it is man's nature to succeed, to exceed, to better himself. "Man's reach should exceed his grasp" and all of that. It's why we "can't all just get along." Okay, enough platitudes. But I haven't seen any indication that socialism/communism works, because, at the end of the day, nobody wants to be the proletariat. Asked how his idealistic aspirations would play out, my French card-carrying cousin said oh, but I'll be one of the administrators. I wasn't surprised.

As for creative destruction, I'm not convinced it's necessarily bad. Building a better mousetrap (there I go again) leaves the guy who invented the earlier one eating dust. It's part of the cycle. Stifling creativity never works. It's not natural. (I just wish I had some.)

I suppose you could argue that progress is bad, in which case we will definitely have to agree to disagree. I've acknowledged in previous comments that I have no need or desire to change your mind, only to present another viewpoint (however misguided? 8-)

-- 01:09, 4 August 2010 (BST)

---

Bwinton:

Danima, given what Oracle has done with Java, I can't imagine they were actually going for "sponsorship". "Disembowelling", perhaps, but not "sponsorship".

Bunny42, I think socialism/communism probably works as well as pure capitalism/libertarianism. Not at all. But I'm not sure what the appropriate mix is. (Well, I've got my opinions, but since I live in Canada, I suspect they're further left than yours. :)

-- 04:47, 4 August 2010 (BST)

---

Columbina:

Bunny, I'm certainly not going to pitch for communism or socialism. I like a certain subset of socialist ideas but in general I distrust big government as much as I distrust big corporations, so an excessively intrusive parent-state would bother me tremendously.

But I'm not sure I really understand why destruction has to be a part of the cycle, why each new trend has to dance on the bones of its predecessors. (For the record I also don't understand our tendency to throw out old technology blindly when there was nothing wrong with it.) Is this the only way progress can happen, by continually wrecking things and rebuilding them? I favor an accumulative view, where you replace the bits as they crumble naturally, and you end up with something that looks like part temple part treehouse part skyscraper part ranch part god knows what, and everybody but me walks by and says, "eww, that's ugly," and I think it's my dream house because I made it into exactly what I wanted it to be and damn the torpedoes.

Hmm, I think I may be digressing here. Well, anyway, you get the point.

-- 15:49, 4 August 2010 (BST)

---

Bunny42:

I do get the point. I used to have a house like that. You suffer from what I had, idealism interspersed with a jarring dose of reality. In my case, reality wasn't necessarily bad, just different. My idealism was making me crazy, so I sighed, dumped those dreams I deemed to be too far from achievable, and then moved on. Head in the sand? Perhaps. But as bad as things get, we always seem to find a way to prevail, to avert disasters of our own making. I believe that wiser, cooler heads than mine will always come up with a solution. The greater problems of the world are not within my ability to influence much, if at all. So I take Sean's advice. If I can't do anything about it, then I don't worry about it.

Seems to me Hillary Clinton once advocated bake sales to, what was it?, reduce the national debt? To me, that's akin to spitting in the ocean to raise sea level. But it made people FEEL GOOD to have those sales, the way it does when they resolve to not buy gas on a given day. Makes zero difference to the oil companies, but John P. Consumer has done his part. Nope, it'll take brain trusts far above my pay grade to solve the big problems. I can choose to live in fear and loathing of what's "happening" to humanity, or I can get on with my life and hope cooler heads will save the world. If they don't, well, I have no control over that, either. If I spend time wondering why, why, why are we this way, I'll soon become a resident of some establishment for the permanently bewildered. And I've got too much stuff to do.

-- 22:08, 4 August 2010 (BST)

---

Danima:

@Bwinton: ah, yes. I really should have put "sponsorship" in scare quotes, but that sentence was getting tangled enough as it was.

-- 23:51, 4 August 2010 (BST)