Hey guys,
Look, we have a fairly serious problem here and it isn’t weather or not the
OS will support hardware redundancy (yikes! this will start yet another
thread off point)
Igor’s overall point is well taken I think. Big organizations don’t like
risk. Having to place their trust in a few people with specialized
knowledge to make something work is a big risk.
I remember when I first learned that it wasn’t more than 200 years ago when
the concept of making all the same pieces for a product was first
introduced. A firearm made by the same company had many if not all parts
that were custom for each gun. Then somebody came around and decided that a
model ought to have all parts interchangeable with another gun of the same
model.
Then a long time later Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. Your car
could be any color as long as it was black philosophy. It worked.
Those entrusted with the management of somebody else’s money believe that
the more generic the process, the less risk they take. I think this is what
we are battling.
I worked for a couple of months with my brother. He was the technical vp of
a internet based sourcing company. They were working on an internet
solution that would tie clothes designers with manufactures. They also
tried to use the generic approach and chose to use a set of tools because
there were a lot of developers that had knowledge of them and everyone was
doing it so it had to be safe. They failed in part because the technology
was not fast enough and had problems they could not find and in part because
they did not have competent people working on the project. He called me in
(too late to make any real difference) so that I could ask the tough
questions because I understood why the technology wasn’t working.
My point is that it seems managers are somehow able to justify failure
easier when, on a technical level, they use stuff that everyone else is
using. It’s when they use stuff that isn’t well known and they fail that
they have nightmares. It is a strange phenomenon to me.
I’ve come to the following conclusions.
-
Big business isn’t going to pay attention to QNX any time soon. If you
want to stick with QNX forget them.
-
Mangers and CEOs of big corporations are sheep and while they seem
invincible, they are really very vulnerable. They are people too, you know.
-
Big corporations die if they do not pay attention to detail. My dad
flies for Continental airlines. Continental has really gotten their crap
together and has become a very well run company. United Airlines is a hog,
its dying, yet it was once thought to be invincible. The good guys can win
out.
IBM was another example of a “if you choose them you will still have a job
when the project fails”. I think our currently big players will also go and
their vulnerabilities will be made known and well understood at some point
in the future. More windows of opportunity will arise.
-
If you want to continue to work with these cool technologies, you will
have to design, market, produce your own products (maybe in colaberation
with others of like mind) that compete with other devices or do something
new that doesn’t exist yet. To rely on QNX’s ability to brand their product
well enough isn’t sufficient we will have to take some matters in our own
hands.
-
The thing that makes the economy work is not big business, it is the
individuals who have a vision and can make it work. Big companies that do
not allow individual contribution I believe will eventually fail.
-
Let the masses go without an understanding of underlying OS
architecture. Let them go without a grasp of the intricacies of the
technologies they are using. Let them make those mistakes, it only creates
opportunity for those who are prepared.
My final point would be this. Just like the Linux people made an huge
impact, so can we. But we may have to do it for free for a while. We may
have to take a lot of personal risks and work really hard at it. We need to
be bold and unafraid. Yes, we may have to do some other things to pay our
mortgages, but if you can be creative, and be confident I know you like I,
will find a way. I really belive in this stuff. I really belive that
companies that choose to educate their developers and go with
technologically superior product will be ahead of the competition. They can
get their products to market fast and with more reliability and more
meaningfull features than anyone else.
Now that we’ve really had some good introspection, it is time to look
outward and to create opportunities for ourselves.
Have Faith and Be Bold!
Kevin
“Bill Caroselli” <qtps@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:a3ot64$p5n$1@inn.qnx.com…
“Igor Kovalenko” <> kovalenko@attbi.com> > wrote in message
news:a3nui5$31g$> 1@inn.qnx.com> …
2. Experience with problem area most of time considered more important
by
employers than experience with an OS. Customers are not interested in
elegance of underlying architecture. They are interested in features and
reliability and in many cases reliability comes in form of hardware
redundancy anyway. QNX is not even good at handling hardware redundancy.
I disagree that QNX is not good at handeling hardware redundancy. I have
developed many client server models where there were redundant servers.
The
servers would mirror each others data. Clients would load balance and
auto-reconnect to the othr server in the event of a server failure. All
of
this was transparant to the underlying application. The user just knew he
was connected to a high availability server.
\
Bill Caroselli – 1(626) 824-7983
Q-TPS Consulting
QTPS@EarthLink.net
