Microsoft .Net's impact to Automation Industry

G
My take on this:

I agree that there are a lot of people who try to make good products for their customers.

However - and ignoring completely the issue of whether one chooses to make good products using Microsoft or Linux - I don't believe that business people are in business to make good
products. They're in business to make money. They may believe that making good products is good for their business, but that's the means,
not the end. If you can convince them that their ends would be better met (improved sales, profits, market share, etc) by embracing different
means (producing lower-quality products), they usually do exactly that.

The measure of success in business is the bottom line. Measuring success in other terms, such as quality of work, or advancement of the state of the art, or personal satisfaction, makes it a hobby, or an avocation, or a passion. It is possible to make money pursuing a passion for quality - I do, and I know others who do as well - but I do not believe that this is the governing principle behind the operation of large businesses, and certainly not for the multinational corporations that dominate the software and industrial controls hardware markets. When there is a tradeoff between quality and profitability, the economic (and socio/political) system in which we operate motivates decision-makers in the direction of profitability, and it motivates them more strongly the greater number of people they have to answer to.

My two cents,

Greg Goodman
Chiron Consulting
 
Again, Curt, I find I disagree with you.

There is no doubt that the security issues of networking and the Internet have caused millions of dollars worth of problems.

But those problems have very little to do with the tech market tanking.

There are two very basic causes of the tech market tanking.

The first is the bursting of the dotcom bubble and the resulting ripple backwards through the entire high technology sector. For example, due to the inflated reports from even the most reputable market analysts, it is now estimated that the amount of dark fiber in the ground will provide expansion capability for at least 5-7 years without new construction in telecom. There are other examples.

The second, in the "applied technology" sector, which includes factory automation, is that the rewards of the integration projects have been less
than as advertised. Too many factory automation projects were done without clear financial goals, and when no immediately measurable benefit arose,
managements began to question why more projects should be done. CRM and SCM projects are running less than 50% success rates.

In a down economy, caused by the dotcom crash, no manager wants to put big bucks into projects with no obvious return, or a coin-toss success rate.

Security issues are a pimple on the nose of why the tech market sucks right now. The big analysts and the big vendors oversold drastically the benefits and the ease of total enterprise integration, and now we are paying for it.

Does that mean I don't think enterprise integration works, and is worthwhile? Heck no. Of course it works, when it is done well, with clear goals, a strategy, ways to measure results, and clear implementation. There are too many good MES systems up and running, now integrated with ERP and SCM systems to say that.

Will the market support an integrator on every corner? No. Will the market support integrators who are careful, organized, have strategic capabilities, and plan their integrations to deliver what the customer really wants, even
if the customer can't articulate the actual need? Yes, and they will get wealthy.

What about security? *nix has holes, too. Remember, the original worm was a Unix worm. The original virus was released in a Unix network.
Self-replicating programs date from before Arpanet. Most of the *nix holes ported to Linux too. Yes, Microsoft has more holes, especially in macros and macroviruses, that are more easily available to the less experienced cracker. But you cannot blame the entire IT security issue on Windows. You might as well blame it on science fiction. Just as the needle-less hypodermic exists because a young person saw Dr. McCoy "using" one on Star Trek, the entire suite of worms, viruses and bots were described in the
1960s and early 1970s by science fiction writers John Brunner and Walt and Leigh Richmond. Described well enough that the terms worm and virus come directly from that source. So you might as well blame Gene Roddenberry.

No, you keep dodging the bullet, Curt. The bullet is that the entire technology and applied technology industry needs to make a market for what we have to sell. We have engulfed the early adopters but have failed to cross the chasm. People are discovering that they don't need a faster computer at home, and that they aren't seeing the productivity gains in the factory, or in the office to permit amortization of the cost of installing even more factory automation and enterprise integration over any reasonable
time base.

In the factory space, mostly, that's a failure of communication on our parts. We have been more interested in the next new thing, and which
software does what, than we've been in understanding business processes and analyzing what systems will actually produce revenue enhancements and productivity gains.

Walt Boyes
co-author of "e-Business in Manufacturing: Putting the Internet
to Work in the Industrial Enterprise" ISA Press--September 2001 ISBN:
1-55617-758-5
____________________________________________
---------------------------------------------
Walt Boyes -- MarketingPractice Consultants
[email protected]
21118 SE 278th Place - Maple Valley, WA 98038
253-709-5046 cell 425-432-8262 home office
fax:801-749-7142 ICQ: 59435534

"Strategic marketing, sales and electronic
business consulting for the small and medium-sized
enterprise: http://www.waltboyes.com"
---------------------------------------------
 
This is a spurious argument.

In the first place, the definition of a "good product" is provided by its acceptance in the marketplace. It is common for people, especially
engineers, to site the Betamax as the epitome of a "good product" done wrong. However, the fact remains that nobody bought it, and VHS was
successful in the marketplace.

Companies understand the "Law of Good Enough" or they either die or don't grow. Companies who spend massive amounts of NRE trying to make their
products perfect lose out to companies who provide products people will buy.

The proof is in the marketplace.

This is liable to again be proven in the automation market shortly. Profibus is an inferior bus when compared to Foundation Fieldbus, yet is winning in the marketplace. Industrial ethernet is inferior to both, yet will be the final winner because of the push to the extended enterprise.

No company deliberately makes either bad products or products that are deliberately dumbed down from what they could be.

Walt Boyes
co-author of "e-Business in Manufacturing: Putting the Internet
to Work in the Industrial Enterprise" ISA Press--September 2001 ISBN:
1-55617-758-5
____________________________________________
---------------------------------------------
Walt Boyes -- MarketingPractice Consultants
[email protected]
21118 SE 278th Place - Maple Valley, WA 98038
253-709-5046 cell 425-432-8262 home office
fax:801-749-7142 ICQ: 59435534

"Strategic marketing, sales and electronic
business consulting for the small and medium-sized
enterprise: http://www.waltboyes.com"
---------------------------------------------
 
C
One small point here is that the Open Source Software community etal. is extremely unlikely to sue you for an inadvertant omission. You might get your skivvies scorched, but we, for the most part, don't retain lawyers for instant action like some corporations do.


Regards

cww
 
G
I'm not sure it's in the OSS community's best interest to tout that we have rules against piracy, but that we don't actually do anything to
enforce them.

If Microsoft was willing to make proprietary modifications to Java in violation of its licensing agreement with Sun - a company with real
money and a signficant commercial incentive to prevent the hijacking of their product - what is it about the GPL and a bunch of volunteer
programmers that's going to stop them from violating an Open Source license?

As soon as some bright kid in some corporate stable of lawyers comes up with a legal argument that looks like it has half a chance at
invalidating the GPL (and/or any of the other sacred documents of our canon), I expect to see a right royal legal battle. And my faith in the
inevitable triumph of good and right aren't so strong that I can dismiss the possibility that the forces whose interests are vested in closed
software might win, leaving the entire body of Open Source code, published in good faith, rendered defenseless against abuse and ripe for
picking.

Greg Goodman
Chiron Consulting
 
G
In that sense, Linux is extremely successful; it is a product that very nearly perfectly matches the needs of its market.

What everybody seems to be talking about is expanding Linux's market to include people whose needs are currently better met by Windows. Part of the argument centers on the issue of whether their needs are *really* better met by Windows, or whether they misapprehend their own needs and
have been made to *think* that Windows serves them better.

Personally, I think both are true to a degree.

Microsoft is clearly meeting the requirements, more or less, of most of the people who buy their software. There *are* alternatives, and they
are reasonably visible, but people keep buying Microsoft. Why? Because the cost to change, in terms of learning curve, complexity,
incompatibility, distance from the mainstream, dearth of hassle-free support, lack of a rich application base, etc. is perceived to be
prohibitive. (And the perception of a prohibitive cost, whether accurate or not, makes it prohibitive. People are generally unwilling
to accept costs that they believe, a priori, to be too high.)

However, it is equally clear (at least to me) that Microsoft is failing in significant measure to meet people's needs, even people who continue
to buy and use Microsoft. People I consult for - people in all-Microsoft offices, people who have never used anything but Windows - bitch and moan constantly about Windows crashing, about Microsoft's newest release introducing more bugs than it fixes, about Service Packs that overwrite newer DLLs with older ones, about the need to get more memory and/or diskspace and/or a faster processor in order to run the next rev of [your favorite example here] software package, about the
ubiquity of virii that threaten to trash their machines, and the incompatibility of one MS application with the next version of itself.

Linux, despite my preference for it, the advocacy of its adherents, and the advances it's made, is not quite ready to go head to head with Windows for the hearts and minds of the average desktop user. Why not? Because most desktop users *aren't* computer users; they're appliance
users. And Windows comes closer to being an appliance than Linux does. Most people want the computer to do what they want it to do... without
their having to tell it what they want. Windows comes closer to doing that, partly because Windows helped shape people's understanding of what they want from a computer, and partly because Windows takes the attitude that "i'm the system, i know what's good for you". People are very often willing to exchange their personal responsibility for convenience. And for something that for most people is as relatively
trivial as word processing or web browsing or gaming, the tradeoff is reasonable - they have better things to do with their time than mess
with the computer. This attitude, of course, is anathema to the Linux crowd, whose creed is "read up, dive in, explore the world, master your
environment, take control, don't let anybody tell you what to do."

What will it take for Linux really to compete with Windows? Linux's ease of use for neophytes needs to be improved. Distributions have gotten better (they're already moving in the right direction and have made some significant progress) about masking internals from those who
don't know/don't care, and providing reasonable defaults for the innumerable configurable parameters. But Linux also needs to overcome
the inertia / ignorance of the people that it wants to pick up as users.

As Ralph says:

> "People don't buy anything...they are sold".

Greg Goodman
Chiron Consulting
 
Most of the time, you don't even need to do that: just have the secret part as a script that the GPL application loads and executes. Most of the time, the bulk of the secret stuff will be just tuning parameters, anyway.

OTOH, oftentimes physical plant security is poor to nonexistent; here we are blocking up the window and the barn door is probably wide open.

Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <[email protected]>
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jiribvisit the MAT LinuxPLC project at http://mat.sf.net
 
D

DAVCO Automation

Curt:

As I repeat every month, once a month for what must now be 2 years........We are all fully aware of your position on MS. By endlessly repeating it over and over again, you destroy your "objectiveness" if there was any.

This reminds me of my laid off coworkers from the IT dept who insisted we couldn't do payroll without our mainframe.

Welcome to 2001, they are here to stay and like it or not the consumers are and have spoken...............customers......what a concept.

As always, until next month........

Dave
 
C
Hi Willy

I'm just catching up and thought your remark needed a reply. Below.

> Probably none, the first time. cww could probably get it done, though, and
> still have time to write a self-tuning PID module for Puffin during the
> breaks.

You completely overstate my abilities. I am not a fantastic programmer as many of those who have read my code will attest. Many reading this are
much more skilled, I'm sure. However, I am not overstating my accomplishments or understating the effort required to achieve them. The big thing here that no one seems to get at all is that I know how to make the Open Source method work for me and I am determined to use Linux for my work. I can do very impressive things without writing much new code or reinventing the wheel. There is a body of knowledge that must be acquired
as a base, but once past that, Open Source is a vast resource and a killer tool that lets a C hacker like me accomplish things far beyond what is thought practical for one person. 90% or more of a project is already written and debugged and waiting to be used. I merely have to glue the bits together and tie it to the bizarre and occult world of automation.

When I am describing projects or I mention that something can be easily done in Linux, I am not tooting my horn, I am saying that the sharing of
source code and knowledge empowers me to be extremely productive _without_ being a Linux guru. That's what I am zealous and excited about.

It's a lot like the VB phenomena. Learn a few things and write a few lines of code and the results are impressive. The biggest thing is getting over the ego thing that you have to write it all yourself.

Generally installing and using Linux is much the same. Yes, you have to learn a few things. But in the process, you find out how to make the
community work for you and the power and speed of working that way will astound you. 24x7, any question you can ask! That's why Linux produces
so many zealots and happy converts and is the crux of the movement. The Return On Investment is what's driving the whole thing. It's widely misstated and even more widely misunderstood.
In fact, it's taken me a long time to identify why it's such a great tool. And that's why no one who hasn't made the effort understands the
excitement. All they see is the ladder, they don't see the slide.



Regards

cww
 
C
Good to hear from you Dave!

This discussion started when someone asked about Microsoft and dot Net.

Regards

cww
 
As far as I can tell, every time the rules were broken, the situation was somehow resolved without winding up in court - sometimes by GPLing code, sometimes by excising GPL code, or whatever.

[Microsoft]
> what is it about the GPL and a bunch of volunteer programmers that's
> going to stop them from violating an Open Source license?

No idea. Seems to be working so far, though...


Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <[email protected]>
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jiribvisit the MAT LinuxPLC project at http://mat.sf.net
 
C
Hi Greg

Greg Goodman wrote:

> > One small point here is that the Open Source Software community etal. is
> > extremely unlikely to sue you for an inadvertant omission. You might get
> > your skivvies scorched, but we, for the most part, don't retain lawyers
> > for instant action like some corporations do.
>
> I'm not sure it's in the OSS community's best interest to tout that we
> have rules against piracy, but that we don't actually do anything to
> enforce them.

Point taken, but I'd still rather see him put his stuff on Linux. That legal battle is surely coming now that big money is involved.

> If Microsoft was willing to make proprietary modifications to Java in
> violation of its licensing agreement with Sun - a company with real
> money and a signficant commercial incentive to prevent the hijacking of
> their product - what is it about the GPL and a bunch of volunteer
> programmers that's going to stop them from violating an Open Source
> license?

They already do. Nothing will stop them. We have to accept that along with the overwhelming good that OSS does for everyone else. Laws don't
affect the lawless. Community action is probably more effective but Microsoft has little to lose with the community either.

> As soon as some bright kid in some corporate stable of lawyers comes up
> with a legal argument that looks like it has half a chance at
> invalidating the GPL (and/or any of the other sacred documents of our
> canon), I expect to see a right royal legal battle. And my faith in the
> inevitable triumph of good and right aren't so strong that I can dismiss
> the possibility that the forces whose interests are vested in closed
> software might win, leaving the entire body of Open Source code,
> published in good faith, rendered defenseless against abuse and ripe for
> picking.

And patenting.

So far, they seem more interested in trying to make OSS illegal.

Regards

cww
 
M

Michael R. Batchelor

The possibility of a class action suite where the only people to profit are lawyers. In the USA the possibility of getting an outrageous judgment against a violator to a hypothetical class of
"defrauded parties" is about 1 out of 1. A big company like MS would get hit with a settlement which would make the tobacco settlement look small.

I have no idea how the courts work in other countries around the world.

MB
--
Michael R. Batchelor - Industrial Informatics & Instrumentation, Inc.
Linux is like a wigwam...
No windows, no gates.
Apache inside.
 
C
Success rates for these major projects are below 50%. I suspect the platform chosen is a major cause. Just my opinion as a consultant who gets pleas to come and straighten out failed projects. Most of them were doomed from the start due to scalability/capacity planning or insufficient customer comittment. I couldn't agree more that it's oversold and it's consistantly MSP's who are guilty of selling something they can't build. I won't touch anything that's not on UNIX. They don't sell anywhere near as many systems but they work much more often. I'd say better than 80%. It isn't just UNIX vs MS, UNIX vars seem to know more about large projects.

> Will the market support an integrator on every corner? No. Will the market
> support integrators who are careful, organized, have strategic capabilities,
> and plan their integrations to deliver what the customer really wants, even
> if the customer can't articulate the actual need? Yes, and they will get
> wealthy.
>
> What about security? *nix has holes, too. Remember, the original worm was
> a Unix worm. The original virus was released in a Unix network.
> Self-replicating programs date from before Arpanet. Most of the *nix holes
> ported to Linux too. Yes, Microsoft has more holes, especially in macros
> and macroviruses, that are more easily available to the less experienced
> cracker. But you cannot blame the entire IT security issue on Windows. You
> might as well blame it on science fiction. Just as the needle-less
> hypodermic exists because a young person saw Dr. McCoy "using" one on Star
> Trek, the entire suite of worms, viruses and bots were described in the
> 1960s and early 1970s by science fiction writers John Brunner and Walt and
> Leigh Richmond. Described well enough that the terms worm and virus come
> directly from that source. So you might as well blame Gene Roddenberry.

As I said, with a little spin from Redmond..........

Sure, I'll buy that. So let's say that 99.95 % of the lost billions (and yes it is in the billions) relate to MS viruses/worms and UNIX has had two that propagated to any noticable degree. My point is that people completely excuse this and even more interesting, often cover it up as it is embarrassing. Your causes are correct and easy to quantify. Damages come straight out of IT/IS budgets and delay projects that would have been and directly reduce spending on systems/infrastructure. It is a major factor but it is occult.

Not spending is the obvious reason for the tech crunch.

And even if MS had reasonable security, the monopoly scenario is the worst possible case for worm/virus propagation. Even a small percentage of anything but MS would have a major impact on speed and scope of propagation. It would be cost effective to add Linux boxes to the mix simply for that reason if you let them sit idle, doing your services on them would drastically reduce the
problem..

I do blame it on Microsoft. They know exactly what the environment is like and have ignored it and the protests of their customars for years. Hackers and virii are a fact of life you have to deal with.

> No, you keep dodging the bullet, Curt. The bullet is that the entire
> technology and applied technology industry needs to make a market for what
> we have to sell. We have engulfed the early adopters but have failed to
> cross the chasm. People are discovering that they don't need a faster
> computer at home, and that they aren't seeing the productivity gains in the
> factory, or in the office to permit amortization of the cost of installing
> even more factory automation and enterprise integration over any reasonable
> time base.

Yes, we need less costly, easier to integrate systems that don't obsolete the customers existing investment. Where are those most likely to come from? The current extortion of out of control license costs and compliance blackmail does not strike me as helpful to anyone but Microsoft, although by most accounts it has greatly increased the interest in Linux. You are
expanding your market by widening the scope. I am attacking the basic value equation. I submit that in a bear market, better value get more ears than bigger systems. Microsoft's strategy is just to squeeze more money out of their captive market. It'll be interesting to see which prevails.

It's just like I said Walt, we need to commoditize automation to get more business. It's stagnant at the present value point and large scale efforts are going to be deferred.

> In the factory space, mostly, that's a failure of communication on our
> parts. We have been more interested in the next new thing, and which
> software does what, than we've been in understanding business processes and
> analyzing what systems will actually produce revenue enhancements and
> productivity gains.

You operate in a different world Walt. In my world, my customers aren't at the point where they have their processes sufficiently refined and
optimised to gain from top to bottom integration. I would be interested in who you are selling that stuff to. To sell more to exixting customers
something has to change. My formula is to keep services and reduce HW and SW costs to the minimum.

Regards

cww
 
Interspersed with major snippage, at @@@@

> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Automation mailing list, managed by Control.com Inc.
> [mailto:[email protected]-CONTROL.COM]On Behalf Of Curt Wuollet
>
> Hi Walt
> Success rates for these major projects are below 50%. I suspect the
> platform chosen is a major cause. Just my opinion as a consultant who
> gets pleas to come and straighten out failed projects. Most of them
> were doomed from the start due to scalability/capacity planning or
> insufficient customer comittment. I couldn't agree more that it's
> oversold and it's consistantly MSP's who are guilty of selling
> something they can't build. I won't touch anything that's not on
> UNIX. They don't sell anywhere near as many systems but they work
> much more often. I'd say better than 80%. It isn't just UNIX vs MS,
> UNIX vars seem to know more about large projects.

No, Curt, the issues aren't platform dependent. The issues aren't mostly even TECHNOLOGY dependent. The failure of many enterprise integration, SCM and MES projects are closely tied to exactly what you said: poor planning
and specifying at the front end.

You may find that *nix works better. The data, however, appear to indicate that it is a toss.

It may be that Unix VARs know more about large projects, but I know some Windows VARs who have done some pretty large ones too.

>
> > Will the market support an integrator on every corner? No.
> Will the market
> > support integrators who are careful, organized, have strategic
> capabilities,
> > and plan their integrations to deliver what the customer really
> wants, even
> > if the customer can't articulate the actual need? Yes, and they will get
> > wealthy.
> >
> > What about security? *nix has holes, too. Remember, the
> original worm was
> > a Unix worm. The original virus was released in a Unix network.
> > Self-replicating programs date from before Arpanet. Most of
> the *nix holes
> > ported to Linux too. Yes, Microsoft has more holes, especially
> in macros
> > and macroviruses, that are more easily available to the less experienced
> > cracker. But you cannot blame the entire IT security issue on
> Windows. You
> > might as well blame it on science fiction. Just as the needle-less
> > hypodermic exists because a young person saw Dr. McCoy "using"
> one on Star
> > Trek, the entire suite of worms, viruses and bots were described in the
> > 1960s and early 1970s by science fiction writers John Brunner
> and Walt and
> > Leigh Richmond. Described well enough that the terms worm and
> virus come
> > directly from that source. So you might as well blame Gene Roddenberry.
>
> As I said, with a little spin from Redmond..........

Bullship, Curt. The Richmonds wrote in the early 1960s, and _Shockwave Rider_ was written in the early 1970s....long before Bill Gates got out of
high school.

The first virus I know about propagated through the DOD net in the early 1960s. I knew the programmer who claimed to have written it. Microsoft wasn't even thought of then.

> Sure, I'll buy that. So let's say that 99.95 % of the lost
> billions (and yes
> it is in the billions) relate to MS viruses/worms and UNIX has
> had two that
> propagated to any noticable degree. My point is that people
> completely excuse
> this and even more interesting, often cover it up as it is embarrassing.

How can you sit there with a straight face and claim that there have been only two Unix viruses or worms? If you are going to descend to such
nonsense, I won't even discuss things with you. Do you hate Gates that much?

Hell, there have been more than two Macintosh viruses. And Macintoshes aren't supposed to get viruses.

> Your causes are correct and easy to quantify. Damages come straight out of
> IT/IS budgets and delay projects that would have been and directly reduce
> spending on systems/infrastructure. It is a major factor but it is occult.
>
> Not spending is the obvious reason for the tech crunch.

You continue to miss the point. I can only conclude that you are missing it on purpose. The point is that the _value_ isn't there. If there was value in all the IT endeavors on the factory floor, real, quantifiable value, every manufacturer in the known Universe would be doing all the MES, ERP and SCM projects they could squeeze out of a nickel. They aren't. Why not? It ain't Microsoft, and it ain't the cost of security. It is the fact that we have come to the end of the obvious gains in productivity by integrating the manufacturing enterprise. We need to figure out new ways of organizing
manufacturing. Just making the data visible is no longer a guarantee that it will result in cost savings enought to justify the project.

&lt;more Microsoft trashing snipped>
>
> > No, you keep dodging the bullet, Curt. The bullet is that the entire
> > technology and applied technology industry needs to make a
> market for what
> > we have to sell. We have engulfed the early adopters but have failed to
> > cross the chasm. People are discovering that they don't need a faster
> > computer at home, and that they aren't seeing the productivity
> gains in the
> > factory, or in the office to permit amortization of the cost of
> installing
> > even more factory automation and enterprise integration over
> any reasonable
> > time base.
>
> Yes, we need less costly, easier to integrate systems that don't obsolete
> the customers existing investment. Where are those most likely to
> come from?
> The current extortion of out of control license costs and compliance
> blackmail does not strike me as helpful to anyone but Microsoft, although
> by most accounts it has greatly increased the interest in Linux. You are
> expanding your market by widening the scope. I am attacking the basic
> value equation. I submit that in a bear market, better value get more
> ears than bigger systems. Microsoft's strategy is just to squeeze more
> money out of their captive market. It'll be interesting to see which
> prevails.
>
> It's just like I said Walt, we need to commoditize automation to get
> more business. It's stagnant at the present value point and large scale
> efforts are going to be deferred.

Well, no, that's what _I_ said, but I'm glad you agree.

>
> > In the factory space, mostly, that's a failure of communication on our
> > parts. We have been more interested in the next new thing, and which
> > software does what, than we've been in understanding business
> processes and
> > analyzing what systems will actually produce revenue enhancements and
> > productivity gains.
>
> You operate in a different world Walt. In my world, my customers aren't at
> the point where they have their processes sufficiently refined and
> optimised to gain from top to bottom integration. I would be interested
> in who you are selling that stuff to. To sell more to exixting customers
> something has to change. My formula is to keep services and reduce HW and
> SW costs to the minimum.


Dammit, Curt, at least read what I say, before trashing me. You just reiterated my point. Most manufacturers don't understand their non-shop-floor manufacturing processes well enough to know how to integrate them.

Until they do figure it out, you can sell all you want at the plant floor level, but beyond that, who knows?

Walt Boyes
co-author of "e-Business in Manufacturing: Putting the Internet
to Work in the Industrial Enterprise" ISA Press--September 2001 ISBN:
1-55617-758-5
____________________________________________
---------------------------------------------
Walt Boyes -- MarketingPractice Consultants
[email protected]
21118 SE 278th Place - Maple Valley, WA 98038
253-709-5046 cell 425-432-8262 home office
fax:801-749-7142 ICQ: 59435534

"Strategic marketing, sales and electronic
business consulting for the small and medium-sized
enterprise: http://www.waltboyes.com"
---------------------------------------------
 
S

Scott Cornwall

> This discussion started when someone asked about Microsoft and
> dot Net.

If I can drift back to the original subject for a brief while...
Whilst driving to work and listening to a www.Technetcast.com mp3 presentation on DotNet, the speaker mentioned that the Dot Net Common
Language Runtime (CLR) garbage collector (server version) can cause delays in an application of a few hundred milliseconds. I would consider this to make the technology pretty limiting for automation, or any near real time application - even for middleware.

Can anyone who knows this technology in a little more detail comment further on this ?

Regards,
Scott Cornwall
_________________
www.sentech.co.nz



 
M

Michael Griffin

So far "Microsoft .Net's impact to Automation Industry" seems mainly to be to increase the volume of e-mail I have been receiving (approximately 120 messages so far). However, I think it is still a worth while subject if we would actually discuss it. So, let's consider Dot Net's impact on the automation industry.

There have been a few comments on Dot Net as it exists today. However, Dot Net is still in its early stages so far. What would be more
interesting is to discover how (or whether) it will affect this industry when it exists in a more developed form.
As someone previously mentioned, something that doesn't generate sales is a hobby, and I don't think Microsoft is planning on Dot Net being a hobby. They intend it to generate a very significant cash flow for them and they intend it to be the centre of their business.

Dot Net isn't about whatever toolkits or specifications anyone may have seen publicly released so far. It's about Microsoft finding ways to generate more revenue from services and less from software sales. It's better thought of as a goal or a direction rather than a product or tool kit.

Given the above, I would venture that in the long run it will look something like this:

1) I think we can expect frequent (at least once a year) "major" revisions to Windows which incorporate Dot Net features as they are developed.
2) Microsoft will likely use their usual strong-arm tactics to get their "clients" (in the feudal sense) to provide demonstration systems the
public can see and try. The direction Dot Net evolves in will be based on feed back from these experiments.
3) Windows itself will probably evolve in a direction which *requires* continuous reliable internet access. This wouldn't likely be a
stated explicit design criteria, but rather an implicit assumption behind many features. The internet services are what will generate the real cash flow so these must be promoted via Windows.
4) The desk top version of Windows will evolve even more in the direction of obscuring what is happening behind the scenes when it does
something. This will let Microsoft change the "plumbing" in Dot Net at will, as these details will be undocumented.
5) You won't buy Windows or most other Microsoft software anymore, you'll rent it on a monthly or annual basis. If you don't pay the regular fee, your computer won't run any more.
6) Microsoft will build more and more "features" into Windows which used to be stand alone applications. The dividing lines between operating system, applications, and internet services will become blurred and
obscured. The idea will be that you pay one very large regular fee for Windows, and everything else you would ever need comes "free" (sort of).
7) Desktop system design will become more centred around the idea that someone is interacting directly with the computer and is able to make decisions on what should be automatically installed on the computer. These
decisions won't really amount to much, as you won't really have much choice if you want your computer to keep working properly.
8) You won't really buy a "computer" anymore. Instead you'll buy a "transaction processing service", or an "office productivity service", or an "entertainment and electronic shopping service". Whatever you do with a
computer will have to somehow fit into one of the established pigeon holes. The actual hardware may be given away as a loss leader.
9) Microsoft will license sub-distributors to provide the direct service to the consumers. There won't be any direct service contact with Microsoft, although they may reserve the most lucrative market segments for companies in which they own a controlling interest. These service sub-distributors may be at least partly based on exclusive regions or territories. These may in some cases be divided along industry lines, rather than geographic lines. You will have to register with one of these sub-distributors before your computer will work.

Now, given the above, how would the automation industry be affected? I would guess that:
a) The normal desktop version of Windows may become unsuitable for most automation use.
b) Microsoft may come out with a new version of Windows to fill the void which the existing ones left behind as they evolved down the Dot Net path. Or they may not.
c) Windows CE and Windows NT Embedded may be abandoned, or allowed to die a slow death if they don't fit into the Dot Net strategy. Microsoft may come out with several replacements which are more narrowly targetted at certain major markets (cell phones, PDAs, etc.).
d) If your application makes use of any of the Dot Net services, the service sub-distributor system may be the source of many problems. Each service sub-distributor will be slightly different, so you will have to test
the product with the one your actual customer uses. There will be fees for everything and endless complaints on this list about those fees.
e) Any discussions about Windows versus Linux will become moot, because Windows will no longer exist as a product which you can go out and
buy. Instead it will be part of a "service" bundle.

Does anyone see anything wrong with the above scenario? It isn't intended as a prediction of how things necessarily *will* happen. It is
however a reasonable and self consistent description of how things *could* happen.
I suppose the point is to imagine a near future in which the computing enviroment is as different from today, as today is from the early
days of the mainframes.


**********************
Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
**********************
 
M

Michael Griffin

At 13:20 04/09/01 -0700, Walt Boyes wrote:
<clip>
>You continue to miss the point. I can only conclude that you are missing it
>on purpose. The point is that the _value_ isn't there. If there was value
>in all the IT endeavors on the factory floor, real, quantifiable value,
>every manufacturer in the known Universe would be doing all the MES, ERP and
>SCM projects they could squeeze out of a nickel. They aren't. Why not? It
>ain't Microsoft, and it ain't the cost of security. It is the fact that we
>have come to the end of the obvious gains in productivity by integrating the
>manufacturing enterprise. We need to figure out new ways of organizing
>manufacturing. Just making the data visible is no longer a guarantee that
>it will result in cost savings enought to justify the project.
<clip>
>Most manufacturers don't understand their non-shop-floor
>manufacturing processes well enough to know how to integrate them.
>
>Until they do figure it out, you can sell all you want at the plant floor
>level, but beyond that, who knows?
<clip>

This is really another subject other than Dot Net, but not really any further off track than most of the replies so far.

I think that the situation is a bit more complicated than your message would indicate. I see the problems as follows:

1) Until recently it has been very difficult or impossible to connect most production machinery to anything. Proprietary networks still make it far from easy.
2) Most plants did not have a reliable office network system to connect to. If the data wasn't available to everyone, it was of limited use.
3) Standard application software which can make use of the data is only now starting to appear. Most previous applications were custom software which were very expensive to create and maintain.
4) People haven't realised what was possible.

I believe that integration of the office to the plant floor will come, but it will be directed from the office level down, rather than from the plant level up. The reason for this isn't need or technology, but rather accounting. If someone from the plant wants to spend any money, they must show a direct cost saving. If someone from the finance department wants to do something, they just demand it and bury the cost in someone else's budget.

Whether any of the above involves Windows or Linux, is of course another question altogether.


**********************
Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
**********************


 
Curt:
> I do blame it on Microsoft. They know exactly what the environment is
> like and have ignored it and the protests of their customars for years.
> Hackers and virii are a fact of life you have to deal with.

I don't blame Code Red on Microsoft. That's an oversight - perhaps it shouldn't have happened, perhaps it should have been caught in testing and
QA, but it's the kind of oversight that can and does happen to anybody.

I do blame them for e-mail worms though. Scriptability of e-mail was a bad idea to begin with, but their response to it was and still is even worse. The following events happened more a year apart:

- Melissa - does no damage (apart from that incidental to its spread)

- LoveBug - deletes non-important files (pictures, music)

- SirCam - forwards documents at random

A *year* between them. And they did nothing.


Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <[email protected]>
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jiribvisit the MAT LinuxPLC project at http://mat.sf.net
 
V

Vladimir E. Zyubin

Hello List,

On Tuesday, September 04, 2001, 8:17:07 PM, Walt Boyes wrote:

LM> This is a spurious argument.

LM> In the first place, the definition of a "good product" is provided by its
LM> acceptance in the marketplace.
[...]

This definition is not good enough. The narcotics are accepted in the marketplace as well...
So, "good product" from the marketplace viewpoint can be a "bad product" from the technical|moral|social viewpoints... Easily.

Mr.Goodman's statement is extremely clear: MS's success in the marketplace is a result of the aggressive and cinical policy to achieve this dominance. The means had, have and will have no value.

LM> No company deliberately makes either bad products or products that are
LM> deliberately dumbed down from what they could be.

But there is a lot of companies that just don't make good products... :) To make bad products is not so hard to use the word "deliberately".
It is not time/money consuming activity. :)

Paradox, but there is a lot of companies that make bad products (from technical viewpoint)... products that are "marketappeal"... plus a number of people uses MS product just because of the mainstream|monopoly.

Really, IMO, the first MS's "good product" will lead to death of MS.
And IMO, MS do realise it.
And IMO, the main problem MS solves is to find a way to force users to buy new versions of the MS OSes. And maniacal passion for the new names is one of the evidences.

BTW, what does abbriviation "XP" stand for?

--
Best regards,
Vladimir mailto:[email protected]

 
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