Amazon: Linux saved us millions

[grg22 at ai.mit.edu (Greg Galperin)]

John Chambers wrote:
> I've seen it described in a less emotional manner, as an illustration
> of  an  important economic fact:  Given a shortage of money, there is
> usually  a  tradeoff  between  investing  in  a  better  product  and
> investing  in  a marketing campaign.  Microsoft is an illustration of
> one of the extremes of this tradeoff.  They've shown what can be done
> if  you don't worry at all about quality, but put all your money into
> marketing.

Now come on, that's not fair.  It's certainly not correct that MSFT
doesn't worry at all about quality.  Even if we were to presume that
none of their products have any "quality," that doesn't mean that
they're not worring about it.  But Windows e.g. truly has been slowly
improving over the years (functionality and stability both).  We do
know that it's their explicit policy to give implementing new features
priority over getting the old ones to work better, but feature set is
one component of software "quality."  You could certainly argue that
they've not achieved maximum software quality (ahem), but we should
assess their state fairly.

I find it odd that you based this on the presumption of a shortage of
money.  MSFT has something like $30 billion cash in the bank.  They
have so much cash they literally don't know where to put it all;
excess money has been a problem of theirs for a long time.

It is true that (last I looked, which was a while ago now) they put
about equal resources ($$, people) into technology and marketing.
It seems to work for them; makes me wonder where e.g. Linux/GNU/
open source software would be if there were as many marketeers freely
donating their time to promoting and improving it as there are people
developing and testing it...

peace,
--grg