the reality tunnel

micosoft digs its own hole

From the Politech mailing list:

Since Microsoft cannot charge the usurious upgrade prices on which their revenue growth, and therefore their shareholder value, depends without substantial feature expansion, the component count must grow linearly (50 new features) if not geometrically (10% new features) per unit time, the quality control costs for them face a cost curve that becomes untenable at some point, the only question being when not if.  Therefore, the greatest punishment you can possibly impose on Microsoft is to forbid them to break up their code base intoi ntegrable product lines as it marries them to a costc urve that will kill them in due course.

This argument is particularly lucid. The only problem is that Microsoft is no doubt intelligent enough to break their code base up as they approach critical mass. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that many will be aware of , let alone care about their reversal of policy.

I took the long way home from Peters tonight. Past the winding driveways of names I once knew. Filip, Johnson. Names which once were uttered daily in my speech, now relics of a forgotten tongue. Today I saw siblings and congregation members - babies now bold children, children now adolescents, and my peers and seniors,gone, gone. I drove slowly home, past the sleeping, dead cornfields, the empty frost covered barnyards, and the quiet, hidden lanes. As I turned down the bright headlights I wondered, will all these names almost forgotten, those faces now firmly sculpted from the soft putty of childhood be gone as quickly and ineluctably as the night’s fog with the morning’s light?

New Glasses

So, ummm, I got new glasses.