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Here is an interesting comment that I found on Slashdot regarding international business marketing. Granted, I think this can apply to many situations in business (and life in general) where someone simply is not able to understand the “problem”.

Its odd, but sometimes the most obvious solutions are the ones that are almost blatantly ignored in marketing (and in many other fields, I would imagine).

For instance, my International Political Economy professor at one point was on a plane heading for Brazil (he was studying something or other while there) and sat next to a guy who worked in the marketing department for the lab that produces and develops Mallox (or was it Alka-Seltzer?).

They got to talking and it turned out the guy was going down there to help figure out this problem they were having in sales. In some areas their product was selling very well, but in other areas it wasn’t selling at all. Marketing had spent billions of dollars (litterally) and said “people in those areas like products that are from the US, so we should put a little American Flag on the packages” and he was going down to do something of a feasability check on this.

My professor turned to him and said, evidently without missing a beat “your product isn’t selling well in those areas because your product provides relief for over-eating and the people in those areas are starving!”

The guy’s face dropped and shortly thereafter was taking down contact information and writing notes.

You would think this would be obvious, but sometimes that is exactly the solution is hiding.

Here is an interesting article that looks in depth at the SPEC benchmarks touted by Apple during the G5 release.

The bottom line –> Apple essentially crippled the competeing platforms (running speed optimized code on the G5 vs memory optimized code on the PC, disabling hyperthreading and other speed technologies on the PC) to make the G5 appear faster than what it might actually be (relative to the other platforms).

While I am glad to see Apple with a new platform (lets face it, G4 was getting REALLY old), I’ll be very interested to see how well it really stacks up to the Intel/AMD systems (particularly the 64bit AMD Opteron based chips).

However, even with all of that benchmarking non-sense, with the gooey goodness of *nix commands and tools at your fingertips, Mac OS X still totally rocks — here is to hoping in real world benchmarks, it totally rocks over a competing Windows platform. (perhaps in something other than a few select Photoshop filter tests)

Trolltech will release a GPL version of Qt/Mac on June 23rd at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference.

So what does this mean? Well for one thing, this will make it very simple to port the majority of native KDE apps to Mac OS X. This includes the popular KOffice productivity suite, Konqueror web browser, Kontact personal informaiton management software, games and much more.

Click on the above links to see screenshots of these apps running under OS X.

I am really excited about this. By providing a method of easily porting GUI Linux apps to Mac OS X without the X-Windows interface and associated installation woes, it *should* do several things:

#1 — get Apple developers interested in OSS projects and help improve the software

#2 — Increase the user friendliness and useability of these cross platform apps (Linux users seem more forgiving with UI issues than Mac users.

#3 — Provide Apple with many open standards compliant applications

This is definitely another win-win situation for both Linux and Mac users alike.

According to this C|Net Article, Microsoft is axing Internet Explorer for the Mac. Here are some umm.. fantastic quotes:

Microsoft felt that customers were better served by using Apple’s browser, noting that Microsoft does not have the access to the Macintosh operating system that it would need to compete.

Hahaha.. Sounds like the same thing Microsoft has on the Windows platform. But strangely, there is still a huge amount of browser competition in Windows (Opera and Mozilla to name the two big ones). Whats even more interesting is those two browsers are more standard compliant and have more features than Internet Explorer.

The bottom line is this –> Less Internet Explorer on the market = more people will be using other browsers and more websites will be written to web standards instead of IE only.

I found this interesting article on eWeek that talks about the SQL Slammer worm that was unleashed late January 2003.

While I agree with the article that both Microsoft & customers need to take joint responsibility for security issues (Microsoft for releasing shitty code and customers for not adaquately securing their services), I did find a very interesting quote:

Nathan Hanks, managing director of technology for Continential Airlines stated “My Linux server at home has three times the number of critical updates than my Windows XP box, which sits right next to it. It’s just a fact that all the guys hacking Microsoft are Linux guys, that’s the game here.” (emphasis added)

What?!? Microsoft & its customers are ill equipped for security issues and its a Linux issue? Linux had ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with it.

So I checked Microsoft’s site. Interesting, they had a huge case study on Continential using Microsoft products across the enterprise .. but strangely, it was taken offline from the server (Google cache served it up) — however, it appears that Microsoft is still paying out to customers to bad mouth Linux (bad mouth linux, get a discount?) — I find it funny that Nathan Hanks, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF TECHNOLOGY FOR CONTINENTIAL AIRLINES, runs Continential on Windows and Microsoft equipment, but opts to run a Linux server for his own personal home usage. If Linux is such a problem, don’t you think he would run a Windows box instead?

Of course, what I find extremely interesting is even though Nathan Hanks claims to have to patch his Linux box 3x more often than Windows XP (remember, these are CRITICAL UPDATES, not just software updates), one of the last sentences in the article is classic:

Customers also told Microsoft in no uncertain terms that they want help going forward to ensure that their systems are truly locked down. They also want an easier way to deal with and install the volume of patches coming from the company.

An easier way to deal with the VOLUME OF PATCHES COMING FROM THE COMPANY (Microsoft)

I dunno .. I run a lot of Linux servers … if Microsoft’s release of critical updates was only 33% of a standard Linux box, then umm.. it must be a breeze to admin .. perhaps a trickle.. (few a year? one critical update every umm.. year or two?)

Yet another classic example of the Microsoft FUD machine hard at work.