Ok, so let's see, that's 99,999,999 licenses then...

You could add up all the Ubuntu-wielding moms in the world, along with all the Ubuntu-wielding offspring, and it won't move that needle in the slightest.

I use Mac, Ubuntu, and ChromeOS, so no love for Microsoft here, but this belief that somehow Linux marks any kind of threat to MS on the desktop or laptop is silly. Most of the world runs Windows on those machines, and always will.

The thing that will shift that is not your mom, or even your mom times 1 million. The thing that will shift that is the move away from those devices, to Android. But Microsoft will still see incredible income from Windows during that shift.

It's worth noting that there's not a psychologist in the world that would agree with this assessment. People aren't 'good' or 'bad' like there some global variable that's been set. Behavior varies by circumstance; many of those girls who were 'good' in circumstances where they were being observed were doubtless 'bad' when they were alone, or only with peers.

It only takes one "Two Girls One Cup" to upset someone, especially a child, and the blithe assumption that 'Good kids will know to do the right thing, and all our girls are good' sounds like a flavor of the No true Scotsman... fallacy, and one that allows her to equate "No one has come to me" with "There is no problem here."

But this assumes that the natural lifespan of a company is infinite. What I think Geoffrey is saying is that when Kodak went out of business, the answer to "what exactly went wrong?" is that nothing went wrong.

Here's an analogy: Imagine I offered you one of two things: 200 millions tons of granite rubble, or a cathedral. Which would you pick?

The cathedral is the obvious choice -- the stone in its raw state is fairly dull, while a cathedral is a spectacular work of architecture, the fruit of countless hours of skilled human effort. The cathedral has value right now, while the rubble isn't good for much without an enormous amount of additional labor.

What if labor was part of the equation, though? What if I gave you a choice between the beautiful cathedral and the chaotic rubble, with the stipulation that, after you chose, it was your job to build a bridge.

Now you want the rubble. Though the cathedral and the rubble are made up of about the same amount of stone, building the bridge out of the rubble will consume all the energy required to build a bridge, but building the bridge out of the cathedral will require all the energy needed to build a bridge plus all the energy required to dismantle the cathedral. For some tasks, it's simpler to start with raw material than with a beautiful structure that has to be dramatically altered to serve your purpose.

Now imagine I offered you one of two things: You have to build a digital photography business, and you can start with Sony, or Kodak. Which would you choose?

The problem Kodak faced wasn't that they couldn't have become a digital photography business. The problem Kodak faced was that the digital business was so different from what they are good at that the restructuring costs were crippling, *precisely because they were perfectly adapted to the previous era.*

Cached copy here: http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:y8CuWLUgkMkJ:beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/+http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/

http://beginningruby.org/what-ive-earned-and-learned/ redirects, via seal.verisign.org, to the American Cancer Society. DMCA takedown *plus* domain-jacking?