| Björn Helgason 2005-10-09, 6:55 pm |
| > One problem I see all the time is that most people's only real contact
> with computers is running garbage from M$. As a result, they don't
> realized how incredibly pissed off they should be about it. Computers &
> software were always viewed by the masses as mysterious things that
> produce magic in a box. Now everyone is convinced that a constant stream
> of bugs, poor user interfaces & viruses is just the way all
> computers work. They seem to think it's unavoidable, so they don't
> complain, and they don't take their business eleswhere.
This seems to be true and we seem to be in a visious cycle
Very many of us try to use something else but do have to use at least
something from M$
This all started because at the time when they started all the good
applications were very very expensive
They more or less gave their garbage away and millions of people jump
on it
The people selling good expensive computers more or less ignored the
trend and nobody in his right mind
thought that the good applications would loose out for this
Some of them started to support cheaper versions of their software but
were still much more expensive than M$
Interestingly enough Linux is now available and is even cheaper than M$
but people still continue to favor M$
There are free versions of APL available and others nearly free but
people are not flocking to get APL
So it is not enough to just have things free there is something more
needed
Interestingly enough Google seems to be coming up as a new threat to M$
and the new connection between
Google and Sun seems to be very interesting
Running APL as web service could be a good idea
Letting people get access to APL service on the web
They could send in their APL lines together with data and have it
processed
The Web could give access to large amount of libraries
I have not heard about anyone having a service like that available
Lets say someone would start something like that
They might have a limited version for free
That is the FULL power of APL but maybe not to large amounts of data
and not to all libraries and utilities
That is possibly sort of what IPSA did long ago but nothing was free
If they had offered something like this instead of selling IPSA
installations to customers
Maybe they would not have gone into trouble and needed to sell the
business to Reuters who killed it slowly because of lack of management
skills and understanding what they had in their hands
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