Subject: RE: Doing "real" work

From: "Michel Py" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 08:47:45 -0800

Charlie,

> Charles E. Perkins wrote:
> What if the market were shaped by:
> - using questionable business practices to
> cripple/kill competitors?
> - predatory/stupid legislation?  (e.g., efforts to
> outlaw "French" technology)
> - selective failure to enforce existing legislation?
> - powerful and misleading advertising?

There certainly is some of it, but it's not everything either.

What I'm concerned about are these guys and gals that say "Cisco routers
are junk. These guys at Cisco don't know jack about routing, it's
fortunate they bought Linksys so they will get clued engineers from the
acquisition, and my router that I put together with a recycled PC and
two pieces of duct tape is really way superior to Cisco products". Yeah,
right. If Cisco became market leader, it is because of their ability to
design and manufacture products that actually work in enterprises and
not because of questionable business practices.

The same people torpedo group efforts to work on difficult issues
because it has to be their way (that's better than the Cisco way or for
the same topic any compromise that a WG could come up with) or no way at
all.

[note: I do not work for Cisco]

> Does it mean that we should require new sections in
> every Internet Draft explaining how the protocol can
> succeed by suggesting some clever strategies for
> misleading advertising and so on, or how to kill
> competitive protocols? I know you didn't want to
> suggest this.
> Maybe you didn't really mean what you said. It
> amounts to "might makes right".

Not at all. It amount to "no solution because we found more comfortable
to put issues under the rug is worse than an imperfect solution". If we
don't provide a site-local solution, there will be a Microsoft solution,
a Sun solution, a Cisco solution, a Juniper solution, etc. Eventually
one or more of these will become a de-facto standard, and then people
will be whining "how dare these big mighty companies produce solutions
without talking to us; they abuse their power to impose their solution".

Michel.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 12:07:44 -0500

> not because of questionable business practices.

Hmm..  So the whole DoJ/Microsoft thing was what, exactly?

(We're a Cisco shop, and their gear mostly works for us, even with some of
the truly demented things we try to do with it.  I'm merely objecting to
the assertion that technical clue is the only way to market leadership...)

---

From: Richard Perlman <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2003 09:10:46 -0800

I guess I am missing something here about free markets and free societies.
What is wrong with criticism?  If it is valid, then the results are
deserved, if not, then it will be ignored.  The fact is that for many people
the home-made router is superior for many reasons: price, control,
flexibility, etc.  For many others a commercial product is better,
performance, support, availability, etc.

Successes, unfortunately, not determined solely by product and technological
excellence.  Like it or not, the color of the box, name and even the logo
all affect sales.  IBM had complete domination of the computer market for
years.  Not just because they had superior products, they did not, but
because an IT manager could not get into trouble for buying "Blue."  Buying
IBM meant buying job security.

Richard