[Emc-developers] a second thought

[Ray H. <re...@up...>]

We did so well with the discussion around the last post that I want to 
try it one more time.  Infoworld again, this time Neil McAllister, the 
editor, and boy did he -- IMO -- get part of it wrong.  This is not to 
pick on the man, Infoworld does a lot better than most of the IT garbage 
that fuels a good share of my suplementary home heating trash burner.

McAllister was commenting on some of the new top management choices at 
Novel, most notibly Jeffrey Jaffe.  Jaffe was president of Lucent 
Technologies' Bell Labs.  Jaffe is quoted as saying.  "I've believed for 
a long time, actually starting from when I was at IBM, that open source 
and open standards are what customers want,"

"All the people in the open source community really need to be working together, and that's part of my job: to get everybody working together to make open source a reality for customers," Jaffe said. "I think getting the focus on delighting customers is the way to unify people."

Now right here is where McAllister goes way wrong.  He says, "Unfortunately, although that's an admirable sentiment, it's ultimately an empty one. "Delighting customers" is a great goal for Novell. After all, Novell has customers. The open source community, on the other hand, doesn't. Nor does it even have products in the traditional sense.

I don't know about you, but I'm an EMC customer.  And I don't care what he says, EMC is a product that I use.  Sure it is an evolving product and it can appear to be a bit less than solid, like a new washing machine or toaster is solid.  Sure you can download it and never have it touch anything other than a USB stick or hard drive but that does not make it not a product.

Just because we have not charged for the use of our code, does not mean that the receiver/user is not a customer.  There are a lot of folk out there who know better.  And even though we tend to develop code because we want it, or need it does not make us any less of a product production team that a bunch of folk sitting on the campus in Redmond or San Diego.  Nor does it make us less responsible as a software producer to try to meet our common needs as customers.

Ray