There’s an old, and I have no doubt, accurate story about Henry Ford. Flush with the success of the Model A (this is before things went tits up with the Model T and the Great Depression), he sent a bunch of, well, management consultants out into the scrap yards and gave them the following instruction:
“Count up the number of our components in the scrap yards, and tell me what goes wrong the most.”
Apparently they all came back, and to a man (these were ungenerous days, genderly speaking) told him that the one single component that they couldn’t find in the scrap yards was the kingpin. (Don’t ask me what it does; that’s not the point.)
“Fuck!” said Ford. “It’s a Jewish Conspiracy …”
Well, actually, I’m just guessing, and the story went more like this:
“Fuck!” said Ford. “We’re manufacturing those kingpins at $5 each, and they never break? Find me somebody who will build kingpins for us at 99c each, and I don’t care how long they last.”
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One source of continual amusement with the Loons is this “back from the dead” technology thing. To be fair to ole Hank, I could probably still drive a Model A around; but I seriously don’t want to revisit my 66MHz PC from back in 1997 or so. Not even with the fabled Linux desktop on it.
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Which leads me to this thought: the one single thing holding Linux back from dominating the World is not Microsoft marketing. (Which is surprisingly pitiful.) It isn’t even the lack of USP applications. No, and it isn’t the hideously broken desktop experience, either.
It’s the lack of $5 kingpins.
If this incredible, enthusiastic, bunch of altruists could actually persuade hardware manufacturers to build ridiculously cheap computers that don’t blow half the capacitors on the motherboard inside five years … don’t, in other words, Cheat On The Whole Free World like the Nazi scum from Detroit they are …
Finally! We would have a TCO version of the Linux Desktop that would have street teachers in Manitoba and all over the world gainfully employed as dumpster divers and saviours of Gaia!
If only.
Comments
My grammar parser gave a CannotParseNonsense exception, on reading the third paragraph from the end.
But if I understood that right, what you are trying to say is that manufacturers don’t provide cheap, old computers that run Linux on them. So on of the primary advantages of Linux is nullified.
I would beg to disagree seeing how Windows XP still has the largest market share.
I lose, then.
“But if I understood that right, what you are trying to say is that manufacturers don’t provide cheap, old computers that run Linux on them.”
The million eyes must have done a great job on that parser of yours, then. After all, we are talking about plain English here, not Old High German.
The point is plainly obvious on its own, but if your open-source pea brain happens to be struggling to comprehend it, then, by all means, try some additional reading, say, this:
http://www.whylinuxisbetter.net/items/alive/index.php?lang=
The subject in question is not about manufactures selling machines savaged from dumpsters preinstalled with Linux (even though apparently this is the sort of insane ideas your million-eyed noggin has convinced you to believe in), but about the tired Linux advocate sound bite that you can somehow “rejuvenate” your N-year-old PC with {insert a distro name here}.
To give it another analogy, new Tupperware won’t bring wilted lettuce back to life.
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