

The Back Door - dpapathanasiou
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/19/BackDoor

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13ren
Tim Bray's evaluation of the predictive power of 9 factors of technology
success

    
    
      1. Management Approval	- all over the map
      2. Standardization		- another signpost pointing nowhere
      3. Return on Investment	- apparent ROI has no predictive value
      4. Compelling Idea		- weak negative correlation between buzz factor and success.
      5. Investor Support		- not obviously a useful predictor
    
      6. Good Implementations	- a useful predictor
      7. Happy Programmers		- a useful predictor
      8. Technical Elegance		- a handy predictor
      9. 80/20 Point		- This one is a slam-dunk

<http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/01/03/TPM1>

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davidw
What I don't get about their open source strategy is how they're going to make
money at it. Consulting? Selling complements?

It's doable, but it's tough, and it might be impossible for a company not
built from the ground up for that purpose.

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delano
Open source is more respectable than free and it comes with a lot of benefits.
Plus services are more profitable over the long-term than licensing.

But yeah, it's probably more difficult to ramp up that vibe in a mature
company. Even internally.

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Lally
Looking at the last quarterly reports, Sun's not doing so great.

What are they missing?

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delano
Once bit, twice shy. They charged a mint through the 90s and into the early
2000s and a lot of companies got burned paying off those contracts after the
cash flow tightened up. Many of them refuse to do business with them.

They're also really banking on parallel processing (i.e. with CoolThreads)
which will probably catch on with cloud services rather than directly with
development houses. It takes a totally different mind-set to develop for 128
simultaneous threads.

They have some killer technology though. DTRace still blows my mind.

