Get to them when they're young

Quote: TheCesspit

Capitalists, the scout movement, astronomers and ice hockey teams too...

That's what I thought when we still had the draft.

A man in his last teen years is at his physical prime, and still able to be brainwashed into jumping out of a trench and charging a machine gun nest.

Old guys are harder to convince.

Quote: petroglyph

A man in his last teen years is at his physical prime, and still able to be brainwashed into jumping out of a trench and charging a machine gun nest.

It is the testosterone. As long as there are young men in the world there will be war. They always find some cause to fight for.

Quote: Wizard

It is the testosterone. As long as there are young men in the world there will be war. They always find some cause to fight for.

I find your ideal/tired factor changes over time. Older you get the more tired you get of fighting. You pick your battles more carefully.

Quote: AZDuffman

I think you mean Steve Jobs but I remember in college hearing he thought owning education in the 1980s meant owning business in the 1990s. One of the few things he missed on as what he missed was by the time the kids could make decisions for business the IBM salesforce would have business locked into a standard for decades.

Agree on the teachers, it crazy.

Microsoft did the same thing by giving away or not pursuing pirated licences of Windows/Office at Univerisity level... knowing they could easily sell people later on as 'Office is the standard'.

Quote: TheCesspit

Microsoft did the same thing by giving away or not pursuing pirated licences of Windows/Office at Univerisity level... knowing they could easily sell people later on as 'Office is the standard'.

I have always wondered if that was intentional or not. It really used to be a joke if you paid for Office, until the early 2000s when WordPerfect was buried. Then they really made it tough. Yeah, I tried to leave the evil empire but clients demand otherwise.

Quote: AZDuffman

I have always wondered if that was intentional or not. It really used to be a joke if you paid for Office, until the early 2000s when WordPerfect was buried. Then they really made it tough. Yeah, I tried to leave the evil empire but clients demand otherwise.

They had this part to it, but they also had in their favour they made better software than anyone else out there at the time... and in many cases, still do. Multi-featured software is -hard-. Every incremental feature takes marginally more effort, as complexity goes up.

The fact Excel and Word work at all so that they keep being the defacto standard is testament to that. The barriers to entry are high, and not all of the barrier is artificial.

Quote: TheCesspit

They had this part to it, but they also had in their favour they made better software than anyone else out there at the time... and in many cases, still do. Multi-featured software is -hard-. Every incremental feature takes marginally more effort, as complexity goes up.

The fact Excel and Word work at all so that they keep being the defacto standard is testament to that. The barriers to entry are high, and not all of the barrier is artificial.

Well it was more than one thing. WordPerfect 5.1 was the standard, but 6.0 was so horrible people switched. Lotus 1-2-3 had a big jump in features about the same time. Meanwhile, Office was on many PCs when Windows 3.0 and more important 95 hit. So IMHO it was a rare instance of standard-shift.

OpenOffice may make a dent over time, but nobody will make a paid competitor anytime soon if ever. Open source is too much the future.

Quote: AZDuffman

Well it was more than one thing. WordPerfect 5.1 was the standard, but 6.0 was so horrible people switched. Lotus 1-2-3 had a big jump in features about the same time. Meanwhile, Office was on many PCs when Windows 3.0 and more important 95 hit. So IMHO it was a rare instance of standard-shift.

OpenOffice may make a dent over time, but nobody will make a paid competitor anytime soon if ever. Open source is too much the future.

Meh. Opensource software has it place. However, it doesn't pay for the people making it, the quality is variable and in many cases there's no validation, which makes it impossible to use in many regulatory environments. Open source projects suffer often when lynch pins gives up their part of the project. Opensource doesn't always mean free, either.