:Archives (April 25, 2003)

Friday April 25

Best Player In The World

SI.com - Hockey - Jagr could be offseason trade bait for cost-cutting Capitals

Jaromir Jagr says he "want to be the best player in the world," but the Washington Capitals are considering a trade because he costs too much money.

Well, you can be a great player on a bad team if the rest of the folks are mediocre. Jagr played spectacularly, but his crisp passes were often missed by lackadaisical teammates and when the opposition banged on him -- as Tampa Bay did by beating up his face, leaving him out cold on the ice with a blood-splattered uniform -- no one on the Caps ever retailated. Bloody_Jagr" The Caps have asked Jagr to do it alone, which has never worked in hockey. Orr needed Esposito, Gretsky needed Messier, but Jagr's got a bunch of mediocre journeymen.

Ted Leonsis, listen up! You want fans to pack MCI Center, get a good team, a consistently winning team. Don't send players away and go with two-bit has beens and unproven rookies. Pick up a Sergei Zubov -- a real defenseman -- and a Pavel Bure, a Ziggy Palfy or (dare I say it) a Vincent Lecavalier. Get Jagr his Esposito or his Messier, and you will fill MCI Center to the rafters every night.

 Posted by glenn at 11:13 AM | Comments (1)

Ballmer Says Linux Is "Cancer"

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, once again on an anti-open source crusade, now says that Linux is a "cancer" but that the new Windows Server 2003 product can compete with free software because is it "innovative." [CNET.com]

Innovation is not something that is easy to do in the kind of distributed environment that the open-source/Linux world works in. I would argue that our customers have seen a lot more innovation from us than they have seen from that community. . . . Linux itself is a clone of an operating system that is 20-plus years old. That's what it is. That is what you can get today, a clone of a 20-year-old system. I'm not saying that it doesn't have some place for some customers, but that is not an innovative proposition.

All this from the company that brought us a desktop GUI in 2000 that Apple made available in 1987, that specializes in buying technology developed elsewhere (DOS, PowerPoint, IE, etc.) and that still cannot fugure out how to put a laptop computer to sleep. Eat your Cheerios, Steve, you're going to need them. All you have is monopoly power; in the long-run, that's not enough to save the company.

 Posted by glenn at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)