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RE: Good Times Ahead for "Sharecroppers"? (Was: [OT] Tim Bray

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• Subject: RE: Good Times Ahead for "Sharecroppers"? (Was: [OT] Tim Bray on Slashdot)
• From: Rick Marshall <rjm@z...>
• Date: 15 Jul 2003 07:22:40 +1000
• In-reply-to: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE022DC570@h...>
• Organization: Zenucom Pty Limited
• References: <15725CF6AFE2F34DB8A5B4770B7334EE022DC570@h...>
• Reply-to: rjm@z...

which is why farmers worship at the temple monsanto.....

in case you forget this is not the only industry plagued by a large,
aggressive, monopolistic player

and personally i think we are poorer for it

rick

On Tue, 2003-07-15 at 00:38, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> I won't argue with it because I think you are essentially right.  But
> you don't have to 
> go to Longhorn to find an example.   To sweeten land for crops (to
> follow a 
> directed ecology metaphor), one learns to rotate and leave fallow. 
> One also learns some land is better and can be made better for certain
> crops 
> by fertilization, mulching, and so on.  One knows that too much of
> this or 
> done at the wrong time is wasteful or poisonous.  One learns that
> spraying 
> is faster and cheaper but has the risks of damaging adjacent
> properties and 
> people.  In other words, there are reasons big farms dominate farming
> and big 
> companies run them, and that farming cooperatives are the other
> approach. 
> Size matters when systems are dense and interconnected.   It's a
> management 
> issue.
>  
> To leave metaphor and enter the real world of the software market, it
> means that 
> the companies like Microsoft, instead of co-opting a business domain,
> begin to 
> study market segments and develop strategies that enable those domains
> to 
> work better, either in isolation or in concert.   An example would be
> the one 
> I pointed out for public safety:  RAIN.  (gotta love how well that
> works on 
> farmland:  too little, crops die if too large a field; too much, they
> drown).  
> By enabling the backbone as such and taking care of the problems of 
> interagency intercourse while we work the problems of discourse, 
> they solve a technical problem for us which we 
> can solve ourselves, but which would take a long time, much expense, 
> and which will likely favor a single market vendor's solution.   They
> use their 
> clout over the land to do something which not only helps our business 
> but which helps our customers.  They don't take over the market; they 
> enable it.  Keep reading though because if one makes the leap to 
> ''embrace extend and extinguish" one makes a step too far because 
> as you point out, they need the market software experts and they
> cannot 
> afford to hire them all.  In other words, Microsoft [expletive deleted] at content. 
> Always has.  They can target it like they have games, but they still 
> tend to trip over their own all too expensive cultural tennis shoes. 
> IBM did that too when they were the BigEvilOnes.
>  
> The problem I find with the MS-must-die crowd is that it is just noise
> without solutions. 
> It doesn't help anyone, and I think it actively hurts those who follow
> it. 
> It makes MS the bad guy when they might be the good guy (situational 
> and I am not naive about MS), it keeps people from understanding the 
> patterns of BigCo behavior so the naive party ends up anointing yet 
> another BigCo without realizing it, and in the end, it takes away the 
> flexibility of the individual by substituting one boss (the BigCo) for
> another boss (the Herd).  It leads to the self-immolating behaviors
> such as 
> seems to be the case with Dave Winer when to prevent co-opting, 
> he co-opted (See: The Devil and Daniel Webster).
>  
> Demonizing is just politics and not very smart politics at that.
>  
> Sharecropping worked as long as the sharecropper was free to move 
> on, but it meant the sharecropper was responsible for taking their own
> resources and targeting well that move.   What made sharecropping 
> evil (a simple word for an easily predicted result) was when the
> resources 
> allotted by the land owner always equaled or bested the resources
> derived 
> (in coal mining, "I owe my soul to the company store").  A
> sharecropper 
> is not a slave or a serf, but unless they are paying attention, the
> effects 
> can be the same.   What must not happen (and as an American
> Southerner, 
> I've seen this one up close), is that the environment in which they 
> exist (say existing laws) must not reinforce the tendency to tie the 
> person to the land.   It cannot be the case that to farm, one must own
> a John Deere.   So, and it seems trivial to state here, standards of 
> technology, and like it or not, standards of behavior.
>  
> Like the Google interface, they are as effective as the user is smart.
>  
> len
>         From: AndrewWatt2000@a... [mailto:AndrewWatt2000@a...]
>         
>         If there is a logical case to avoid Longhorn then, in my view,
>         Tim fails to make it. Perhaps he would like to try to make a
>         stronger case.
>         
>         Andrew Watt

• References:
  • RE: Good Times Ahead for "Sharecroppers"? (Was: [OT] Tim Bray on Slashdot)
    • From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>

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