In my city they cut down 10 meters of gardens around blocks of flats to make room for parking cars. Nobody bats an eye because parking is a bigger problem for them.
No one liked Excel better than Lotus 1-2-3. They picked Excel because it worked best on Windows because it used private APIs and also because they would be sold together.
My dad had quite a lucrative decade as a consultant moving people from Lotus to Excel, and every time he was hired the people hiring him would complain about how they were being forced to move to "crappy Excel" because of the purchasing department.
If that’s the case, why couldn’t Lotus compete with Microsoft on Macs - even though they tried? Excel was a better product.
Just like people love to wear rose colored glasses and pretend that the only reason that Netscape lost was because MS was unfairly competing, forgetting that NS was so crashed prone that it was a point of nerd pride on Usenet how well an operating system could handle a Netscape crash.
There are some fairly strong cross-platform network effects between office software, because of file formats. If you had MS Word on the PC and wanted to send documents to a friend who had MS Word on the Mac - well, there were minor issues around disk formats, line terminators, and file transfer protocols, but generally if you had e-mail you could send them a .doc. If you had Lotus 1-2-3 on your Mac and wanted to send files to colleagues with Excel on the PC, you were screwed. (The major software manufacturers did end up reverse-engineering each others' formats by the late 90s, but by then Office had already won.)
If Microsoft had an edge on Windows, which was the majority of computers, then that would translate into inconvenience trying to use any non-MS product on Macs, unless everybody you dealt with used Macs.
Lotus was slow to move any of their products away from the command line. Excel was on the Mac in 1985. Lotus didn’t come to the Mac until 1991 and when it did, it was awful. Microsoft had years of GUI development experience by the time Windows 3.1 shipped because they were producing Mac software. Lotus and WordPerfect were panned for their early Windows products because they were direct ports more or less of their DOS products, not because they couldn’t get access to super secret Windows APIs.
As far as compatibility. By 1990, Apple/Claris had XTND/Apple File Exchange utilities to convert from Rxcel/Word to ClarisWorks. People knew Microsoft’s formats by then.
The Mac was its own little incompatible island back then with incompatible file formats between Mac Word/Windows Word (though they could be translated), resource forks and data forks, file types as part of the file metadata instead of file extensions, heck even text files used different line endings than either Unix or Windows. Mac users didn’t generally worry about seamless interoperability.
On the other hand, back in the day, Office could open every kind of document under the sun.
Certainly. Wealthier people may be more likely than the poor to drive Teslas instead of smoke-belching old bangers, but they also tend to fly more, heat and air-condition their huge houses, use many more gadgets and appliances that generate CO2 during both manufacture and use, etc.
You only have the current benefits because some sort of union fought for them. Call it government, call it whatever but it was an organization fighting on your behalf.
> beyond that their ability to effect change pretty much stops there.
Is that true? You can't negotiate even further by yourself? I think you do.
Really a union fought for my unlimited vacation? I'm not being facetious but this perk is something that IME is unique (or at least originated in) silicon valley startups. Unions fought for more vacation but empirically speaking the free market led to even more.
And before we have the detractors of unlimited vacation coming in. Several of my colleagues take month long vacations, some multiple times a year, withiut reproach. It is objectively superior to my mother's union job
>You only have the current benefits because some sort of union fought for them.
I think that is a bit of a grand statement don't you think?
I've worked non union jobs and I'm pretty sure the benefits I get are not directly due to a union... I wouldn't associate ALL benefits with a union, nor would that necessitate forming one simply if you thought those benefits were related.
I've worked for some nice people, I do belive they seriously want to provide their people benefits...
>Is that true? You can't negotiate even further by yourself? I think you do.
Negotiate what exactly? The Union and corporate relationship generally lays out what the lay of the land is, the the areas that the employer gets to decide are usually pretty obvious and the union isn't likely to call a general strike because an employer made a choice.
If you think that any of the labour laws, health benefits, vacation days, special leave (bereavement for example) or any of the other things you take for granted as part of your normal work day didn't come from unions continually pushing the envelope of worker's rights then I good luck with that.
The remuneration package offered by a business is typically dictated by the business sector (competitors) so saying "I've worked non union jobs and I'm pretty sure the benefits I get are not directly due to a union." is faulty logic. If half the shops are union shops or competition for staff is fierce then pay/benefits will reflects.
Unions gave us 40 weeks (as opposed to 60+), no child labour, work place health & safety (maybe not such a big deal in tech but in other industry it's critical), etc... yes, government legislation made them law but unions applied pressure to get it done. While many aspects of unions have, or appear to have, outlived their usefulness they are still a very important tool in the employer-employee relationship.
Look at it this way, if unions were really just about the money then employers wouldn't care so much and attempt to keep unions out of their businesses (sometimes illegally). An employer could just say to the union "this is how much I have to spend on labour, how would you like it budgeted" and call it a day cause at that point it's just deciding on how big your slice of pie is.
I guess I sound like a union fanboy, which I'm not, but we shouldn't discount the very real impact and ongoing influence unions have.
I just don't buy into the idea that because unions have helped generally compared to decades ago ... that means you should consider one as a solution now.
My simplistic approach to credit: it allows people to buy stuff they can't afford but it drives prices up artificially. Lots of things would be cheaper if people couldn't afford to "produce" money.
Yes but. If you take “cash” or “money” out of it, do you still agree with your own argument? What if you said “lots of things would be less valuable if nobody could cooperate to build anything”?
Well, maybe. But I've learned that you can't take money out of "it". Even in places that strive to do so. If we could we could actually reach some utopia. Communism would become highly desirable.
1. “Money” = cash. (Hard to argue with that I think)
2. Cash is simply a more efficient means of exchange or store of value than custom IOUs (checks basically) or barter (I need milk, you have C++ code. Durrrr?)
I don’t think you want to take “money” out of anything if you agree that money is the above.
That would bar the ability of people to encode trust or information or relationships into pieces of paper (or gold or code or whatever).
(Don’t freak out: relationships are encoded on paper and in gold every day; eg weddings)
So yeah. I think cash (and maybe debt - as per original comment) might be a very powerful tool. Which we should be very careful with.
"The Dispossessed" by Le Guin was helpful for me to think about these problems, which I found went deeper than I thought as a younger person. "IOU"...who is owed? Who owes? Who needs milk?
I threatened them with a court appearance if I ever had another email from them (never had an account, was hitting unsubscribe from every mail I had from them which lasted for exactly 30 days before the next). Voila, never saw another email; they must maintain some internal do-not-email list.
Devops usually means "it's faster and cheaper because we don't have a dedicated sysadmin". The union of good developers and good syadmins is narrow like that of developers and designers.
Maybe true of junior devops that has never done any sysadmin or much programming outside of school. Theres always people who are skilled at their job in whatever field.
Yeah - careful with that generalization though... talent is more a person-to-person and organization-to-organization thing and not a specific title IMO
Hehe. Apple _is_ the Gucci equivalent for phones. There are no better products. And while it's an affordable product for many US citizens this is not case for some EU citizens.
