Humour

Slinky talk on Tall Street

T A Balasubramanian on the difference between Leanox and Windoves.

You, Papyrus Bytewala, CIO of Baffle Corporation, continue going around the many attractions at the Techno Over-exposition of Geeks and Gizmos for Lazy Enterprises (TOGGLE). You have been assigned the role of educative accompanying technology disambiguator, bodyguard and chaperone, to Danny DeVito, the first biped walking humanoid, engaged to bring corporate IT efficiency at Baffle up to speed.

DeVito’s programs, you hope, will be updated with real life experiences. So you expect as you enter the grand Tall Street pavilion, where you are greeted by a soberly dressed penguin.

“Hello, Papyrus. I’m Groucho Goose, Manager, Slinky Marketing Strategy for Confusing Clients, from Duckbill & Goose. Our earliest customer fright strategies were born right here on Tall Street. Our consulting services practise is known for adopting emerging technologies and our tallest products and fishiest tales were tested and proven here.”

“Could you explain what’s happening with Leanox here? My CTO, Danny DeVito, standing here next to me and looking at all the attractive distractions, might want to know.”

“Oh, sure, it’s my pleasure—Hello, Danny. Leanox is big and revolutionary on Tall Street,” Goose says. “Open source is used in all of the top consulting services firms, and who are we to resist it? A big part of Leanox and open source software’s popularity is that open source puts control back into the hands of humans, such as yourself and Danny here.”

“Actually, I don’t know if you can officially call me a human yet,” says DeVito, smirking. “I’m still learning.”

“That’s all right,” booms Goose with a laugh, “my boss thinks I am sub-human too. He calls me an ‘abominable showman.’ But coming back to Leanox, you should know something important,” he whispers.

“And what is that?” you ask, glaring at DeVito.

“With Leanox, the economies of scale and risk reductions of all the expensive design innovations we do are passed right on to the customer,” he says. “Other reasons why open source works for enterprise customers include adherence to open standards, and noble virtues such as value, innovation, quality, choice and flexibility.”

“None of which you get from the high and mighty Windoves side I presume?”

“Exactly. Moreover, an operating system is all well and good, but you need all the other pieces of the ecosystem to make it work optimally. That’s where we come in with our slinky Goosefeather service pack.”

“And so the service pack will now be an ecosystem for Leanox?”

“That’s right.

Goosefeather is too complex to be called a service pack, so an ecosystem it is. But then, since it has a vast array of application vendors and hardware suppliers supporting it, it’s actually a Leanox platform.”

“So it’s a service pack, an ecosystem and a platform all rolled into one?” you say, brightly.

“Well, basically Goosefeather could be called an operating system, but it’s actually an advanced open architecture,” Goose says. “There are 2,500 different programs that come as part of Goosefeather that makes it an architecture.”

“So it’s also an operating system and an architecture?”

“Precisely. We consultants like to be smooth and slinky in defining what we offer. This is why we’re here on Tall Street among the top five.”

“What about Windoves? Is that a platform or an ecosystem or an architecture?”

“No, no. Windoves is a proprietary black box. A big black box you cannot open up to fix if you have a problem. You have no insight into the way it works, even though you own it. How do you know it is something you can trust? And proprietary boxes have huge fixed costs—and that makes them expensive. So what happens when you want to invest for the next version of the box? But with Leanox, you get, in a nutshell, performance, cost and scalability. The technology is 30 times less expensive for the same amount of performance. You would be getting 30 times more bang for your buck in moving over to Leanox.”

“Windoves is therefore 30 times more of a painful proposition, eh?”

“Exactly. It is also mysterious and unpredictable, like Mata Hari. It increases your testing costs because you cannot get into the insides. With these higher costs in testing, that black box starts to become a black hole for your resources. As opposed to the inscrutable black box you get with Windoves, Goosefeather gives you early access to the technology with beta programs that lets you peer into the insides of the product.”

“So can we look at the inside of Leanox and Goosefeather if we have a problem with the operating system … sorry, service pack … sorry, platform … oops, I mean architecture?” says DeVito, his eyes rolling around.

“Oh, sure, you can. What Leanox means to a lot of bright CIOs, such as you, is freedom. Freedom of dependence on Windoves, that is, and the flexibility to modify the open source software—which is why it is called ‘open.’ This means that anyone can change or improve upon the Leanox code as long as they make the changes public on the Internet.”

“Oh, now I’m beginning to get the picture. You have Leanox fighting Windoves by giving away the inside dope to customers, eh? You come clean and that makes people happy? You’re selling clarity and transparency. Now isn’t that a burden for the average CTO like me?” says DeVito, clicking his tongue.

“What do you mean, Danny?”

“Well, I may be a CTO, but I’m not a mechanically inclined sort of guy, so maybe I don’t want to get my hands dirty playing around with the insides of a system. Most customers for cars don’t know anything about internal combustion; they just want to have a car that works perfectly. If it breaks down, they take it to a mechanic to fix.”

“Well, that may be true for cars, Danny. But with operating systems, it’s different.”

“Maybe. But I don’t know if I’m ready to get Leanox or Goosefeather to do my work if it means having to examine what went wrong inside each time it stops working or develops a hiccup.”

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that, Danny. We have our expert team ready to fix anything you may not want to handle on your own. It’s the Leanox Goosefeather Support Slink Service.”

“Wow, you guys think of everything. Well, that’s reassuring, Groucho,” you say. “If I may call you that.”

“Of course, you may, Papyrus. As my namesake, the original Groucho, said, are you going to believe what I say, or what you see with your own eyes? When we figure out finally if what we are offering as Goosefeather is a system, a product, a service or an architecture, we will be signing up with you for a lifetime of upgrades and maintenance.”

“Wonderful. We never need to look at a proprietary black box again?”

“Never. Instead, you will be seeing a lot of the inside codes in your wide open Goosefeather ecosystem, whether you want to or not. There’s no question that Leanox is here to stay as a viable technology, and we are, of course, overly bullish about its prospects.

But we are realists, too, and not totally slinky. For example, Leanox will never rival Windoves as a mainstream desktop PC operating system, and Leanox still has a long way to go before being widely used in back-end applications like databases and enterprise resource planning. We tell you nothing but the truth on Tall Street. It’s all part of our development plan to keep our customers delighted and confused. Like Groucho the original said: those are our principles, and if you don’t like them... well, we have others.”