I think this is dead on.

Google went through a few year phase of greenlighting every internal idea that moved, but look at where they were at as a company: all of their eggs were in the search/ad basket, and they didn't want them to be. They were flush with cash and wililng to pay a high premium to add diversity to their offerings and be a little more future safe.

Even if they threw away 99 projects for every 1 that bore some kind of fruit to do so, I can't with confidence say that, for that company at that time, they made a bad trade there.

I'm not saying you're for 100% sure wrong, but having spent several years of my life working for one of the two aforementioned large American shipping companies, I have my doubts that you're right. The numbers and profitability on these things have shifted a lot over time.

To give you one easy example, gasoline costs at least twice what it did before FedEx's USPS contracts.

Interesting side note: for some zip codes, private couriers and the USPS and FedEx are all involved in handling a single package from pickup to destination. Good luck tracking that one online.

Because most companies, even ones that probably should have a robust data warehouse, don't.

Oh, the stories I could tell you of Fortune 500 companies whose entire record of swaths of financial and historical information reside in Access 97 databases even though the company is using Oracle for other things. Well, the stories I could tell you, NDAs notwithstanding.

Point being, if an area of the country has low enough population density that delivering there is unprofitable, FedEx doesn't. (Or, rather, they'll turn the package over to the local USPS for final delivery.)

Whereas the USPS isn't allowed to say: "Fuck Montana. We're losing money delivering mail there. Let's just focus on cities instead."

You can, but in a large amount (square mile-wise, not necessarily percentage of parcel wise) of the country, FedEx or UPS will hand the parcel over to the local USPS for final delivery.

Honestly, love or hate the USPS, anyone who's spent a year working for FedEx or UPS can tell you that neither is even remotely close to being realistically set up to replace it, much less profitably.

That's not safe, really, in that both UPS and FedEx use the US Postal Service as the final deliverer for their cheapest (and therefore what you tend to get any time an online store offers you cheap or free shipping) shipping option.

Being that you know what you're doing and can admit it, I really can't criticize you.

None of those (excepting Java, which you also disdain) is especially good for writing the kind of internal custom apps that any company of any size has hundreds of.

Which, maybe isn't an area you care about, but in my market there's way more good pay / good benefits / good working conditions work of that kind out there than there are people to do it.

Anything I've written this year, I could write in C or C++, for example. It wouldn't have been as good as fast (which is important, because a day of paying me costs more than all the Microsoft licenses my work will use), but it could be done. Business tends to care about good and fast a lot more than open standards or the assorted advantages (and there are advantages, I don't deny that) of open source.

Uses of Oracle of this form account for easily 95% of the Oracle licenses I've seen in my career.

Say this for Oracle: They have amazing salesmen who can do the equivalent of sell an Formula One car and full pit crew to soccer moms who just want a car to get groceries with.

You know that Akamai's been involved in delivering most of the high traffic/demand content on the internet for over a decade, right? This isn't like a new thing. It's a thing that's been in place for about as long as most people have been using the internet.

I don't know, at this point worrying about what it will do to the internet is like worrying about what those newfangled motorcars will do to our streets.

Where I'm at is I think this:

is a big if.

I would suspect that, for a majority of projects, the number of people who use the code and also will fix bugs in it is vanishingly small compared to the number who download and use the project.

Which is why I don't find his argument very compelling. He's making an argument for an edge case of users and generalizing it to all users. Even as a professional developer I can honestly say I've never fixed a bug in open source code I've downloaded.

In a sense, this is just an example of the stereotypical (and, of course, not universal, but many a joke and anecdote has been told here and elsewhere about it over the years) open source community myopia: Assuming everyone who uses their software is an interested developer with an abundance of free time. "You don't like something about my project's user interface? Why, just fork the project and change it to be the way you want! That's the beauty of open source!"

So, yeah. If you're an interested developer who is intimately familiar with the guts of an open source project and spends a large amount of time interacting with that project, it actually probably is in your rational self-interest to submit your bug fixes to the project. But that's a big if.

I considered that angle, but I didn't think "this works great, if you can use a gasoline-fueled traditional vehicle instead whenever you need to" was a very compelling argument for electric vehicles.

Hardcore open source (well, fill in anything here, but in this case it's an open source guy) advocate thinks doing thinks the way he thinks should be done is smart, and doing things other ways is stupid.

For someone who's a professional advocate for Open Source, I don't think he makes a very compelling argument that it's in everyone's enlightened self-interest to give as well as take. Certainly I've seen better arguments to that effect in slashdot comments.

I don't think I would say 'fad' so much as 'niche'.

For someone who lives in a city and rarely if ever drives outside of that city (and that describes a lot of people I know, even if that's still definitely a minority of drivers) even the current setup of EVs is pretty solid.

But then there's a lot of people for whom it's totally impractical, too.

To be fair, they're targetting serious gamers, a market Apple gave up on back in the 1900s.