[PLUG] The Ernie Ball story

[Ken Barber]

On Tuesday 26 August 2003 09:36, Geoff Burling wrote:
> On 26 Aug 2003, Cory Bertsch wrote:
> > > You may have heard, recently, a guitar-string making
> > > company was hostiley audited by the BSA and the owner chose
> > > to change to Linux in response to how he was treated, 

It wasn't recently.  It was a number of years ago (three, IIRC).  
It's in the news right now because the owner, Stirling Ball 
(Ernie Ball's son) gave a talk at Linuxworld and it was one hell 
of a talk.  So the tech journalists who were in the room saw that 
they had a great story on their hands and Mr. Ball is getting 
lots of press right now.

> > The major kicker was that the BSA showed up with armed police

That wasn't the major kicker.  The major kicker is below.

> You forgot the part where Ball's case was used in countless
> commercials as an example of ``this could happen to you"

THAT was what pissed him off the most.  He's a man of integrity 
whose reputation in his community is important to him, and the 
Gestapo splashed his name all over the place with the label 
"criminal".

There was a large contingent (a dozen or so) of people from 
Microsoft Corporation in the room when he made his speech.  He 
asked right up front, "Anyone from Microsoft here?  Anyone want 
to admit it?" and they all raised their hands.

He was NOT gentle.  It was one of the finest days of my life.

One of the press reports of that event mentioned that it was a 
standing-room-only crowd in that room. That isn't quite true.  I 
was standing, as were a lot of others, but there were lots of 
empty seats.  It's just that he was so electrifying that many of 
us COULDN'T sit down....

Oh my god, he raked M$ over the coals big-time.  Looked 'em right 
in the eye and said, "A simple phone call would have worked."  
But they were after someone to make an example of, and they 
picked a fight with the wrong dude.  This guy is 
six-feet-something and weighs well over two hundred pounds.  He 
appears to be in his late fifties and is an old-school (i.e., 
compete on excellence and service instead of marketing bullshit) 
businessman.

One of the Microsofties asked, "What about all the retraining 
costs of switching to Linux?"

"What training costs?" he shot right back.  "It took most of our 
people all of TWENTY MINUTES to figure out how to use the new 
software, and we're not techies.  We're musicians."

Ouch.

One other man from the middle of the Microsoft crowd asked if the 
switch has "improved his balance sheet" at all, with vocal 
inflections insinuating that his "balance sheet" was probably 
worse (you know, the old higher TCO FUD).

I found that question highly amusing.  The fool didn't even know 
the difference between a balance sheet and an income statement.  
Balance sheets don't "improve" over time; they are either in 
balance (showing that no errors were made), or they are not.

After his talk some Microsoftie came up to him and said, "I'm with 
Microsoft and I'd like to personally apologise for what we did to 
you.  We don't do those things any more, we've changed, blah blah 
blah."  He went on for several minutes, reminding me of the song 
in the South Park movie where Saddam Hussein sings "I can change, 
I can change" to Satan.

Microsoft cost this guy a hundred thousand bucks and some 
low-level functionary from M$ thinks he can make it all OK with a 
"we're sorry, we won't do that again"?  Gimme a break.

At that point, I got distracted by a really cute Asian lady who 
works for Sun Microsystems who wanted to talk to me and take me 
to her booth.  I didn't realize until much later that she was 
probably just a Booth Babe hired for the show, and not one of the 
rare & elusive Hot Geek Girls that we males all dream about.

In all, Linuxworld was a great show this year and Stirling Ball's 
talk was definitely one of the high points.

Ken
-- 
"No man has ever ruled other men for their own good."
	-- George D. Herron