Communism vs Capitalism ...........History repeats itself???

Someone had accused me of being a little too autobiographical in my blogs, but then a piece of writing is only worth reading if it has a soul of its own. So probably that is why every incident i write about, has a "me" lurking in it somewhere.


Well, the above line must have sounded like a cliche so must the title of this blog but then sometimes if it is a trade-off, between soulfulness and being a little "not so cool" which one do u choose??

It's easy to make a choice when u comprehend the deal ,precisely.

Talking of history, mom always tells me that, in all the generations that she has seen this far,different characters play different roles but the soul of the script always stays the same. God has no imagination at all or maybe he just has an amazing sense of humour.

For all you rational people, and for all you "AYN RAND" fans,who just love to prove it to others as to how communism is no good, over a cup of coffee , well let us just do a small reality check before we move on. After the industrial revolution in the europe, when the fruits of nationalization,machinization and the "virtue of selfishness" were changing the lifes and the patterns of thought of the millions of middle class people, people in the labour class were still in the paleolithic age. That was when ,the concept of communism was born.Whenever,communism has been able to attract the fantasy of any nation, it was because every citizen wanted to be like those privileged few. So,psychologically communism starts with a dream to achieve what capitalism produces but does it get there................ok let us not go to the details.

Let us just discuss one small detail here, so communism starts as a war against the tyrant capitalist(russian revolution and many others) to achieve a society of social equality and justice where every one is happy and not just a privileged few. But then does it work? well it becomes a higher form of torture.You have no choice. Power is vested now in the hands of a very few people whose word ends up being the rule of law.


Capitalism..................Communism.............Absolutism

Results(German wall,USSR,tiannaman square,apne india mein........no other party being able to fight the communists in bengal for 30 years now(watch YUVA....one of the amazing hindi movies which no one ever saw))

So what am I getting at:

A few months back when I joined a MNC as this "fresh college fella" and had to put up with a helluva lot of technical jargon, one thing which was the most talked about term was "cloud computing". So lemme simplify.In terms of business models,before the inception of google,there were just two competitive business models,Licensing model and the open source model. So it was simple, either u buy your software from Microsoft,oracle etc. and pay them for the license and they in turn support and upgrade your software and take care of you in terms of feature requests and usability and employ engineers to make their products more business seeking and customer friendly or u could download it for free from SUN or linux site or some other open source company but u will have no place to run to if u are in a situation where some absurd undocumented behaviour crashed ur banks software and u lost a miilion dollars. :)

My college professor used to say that the software world is in the right balance, right now, because positive and negative(which one is which, u choose) are existing together . He was right, because windows or visual studio cannot be sold at too high a price, why?? because once people can't afford it they would rather use linux or java. But what if there were no license based companies at all,well trouble again, all the open source products would become highly crappy and highly unusable(which many of them still are) as they wouldn't have a baseline to compete with.

So in short ,open source if left alone(communism) will result in another choiceless world(like communists have no religion) where u have to use what u have.

And license base companies,if left alone would lead to world where only a few privileged people would be using softwares.

During the cold war(till there was a concept called USSR) US and it's clown nations never had the guts and gumption to attack a country which was suspected of having nuclear weapons and kill millions for the sake of oil.
But now ,because there is a disbalance of power u see the results............

So why am I worried if everything is fine with the software world.

Well, leave it alone for a while.Let us discuss "cloud computing".This is the future google wants.This is where every web based company is headed towards right now. What is it?? Well today when u open your computer, how do u navigate??u open outlook and send a mail,open the messenger installed on ur computer and talk to ur friends,go to my pictures and change ur wallpaper , so much and so on. Have u ever wondered ,if all these were not on ur computer??

Thatz the future a web based company aspires for. They make money not outta selling their licenses but through the ads that show up on them.So their vision is simple, put the entire PC on the cloud(cloud stands for internet). The entire way u use ur computer might change!!! In a few years,u maintain ur company docs in google docs and prepare a presentation online and save it there,have all ur photographs in a picassa web library,use the google reader rather than the adobe reader to read books,don't install a chatting client but talk to your friends after logging into gmail account,watch entire movies online, using youtube.So soon ur PC will not have a single application installed on it and the only thing u need to have to use all these, is a web browser. Well i have heard of rumours that web based companies are planning to provide online programming consoles(substituting JAVA and .NET) and also planning to take the entire operating system into the cloud. Imagine, in a few years as soon you start your computer it won't boot up the OS but connect to the internet first and then boot up from a distant location. HUH................Cloud computing at it's best that would be..............


That is the day I am afraid of, although to the reader it might sound like a very cool thing.Well, all the web based products or most of them are cool to use but they stay in the "beta stage" for years together. These are the initial signs of custonmer neglect.Most of them have problems but no one cares for the simple reason that, businesses hardly use them. What if ,this concept of cloud computing engulfs the entire software world tomorrow, what if everything u use is free , but it's online and there is no support. In the initial few days there will be support but then if this business model ends up winning over others completely then who will "guard the guards". Everyone can use everything coz itz online, all the people who keep saying that licensing and bill gates are the two big problems with the world will finally have a peaceful sleep. But those will be like the first few days of joy in a communistic set up.Remember how people in Afghanistan celebrated the "arrival of Taliban" as it was the end of war and begining of new age.



Licensed..........Web World............Software anarchy


So for me,communism and capitalism, if co existing and doing a balance of power would lead to peace eventually, likewise this script keeps getting played with the same soul but a different costume in almost every other world.

I can't forsee the future,but i don't want either of the models to become supreme.


Am not a science fiction writer, but am sure there is a movie plot ,there somewhere, if u continue.