" It's so boring the kids are still complaining about people who have more money than them" That's not what they are complaining about; they are complaining about them rigging the system further in their favor to the detriment of everyone else.
There is a crucial difference there, and history easily explains why if one bothers.
I worked at SugarCRM for years. It's often easier than one suspects once you figured out what a customer pain points are and show them a less burdensome solve. Most businesses do not need the kitchen sink approach of SFDC or SAP, they just have rarely had that demo'd to them.
"Companies have shown us that IP going to AI providers is acceptable" This is where I'm expecting future collision; you can't both value IP for it's training value, and yet devalue it for the actual sources of IP (people owning their own likenesses or orgs collecting data from their own activity)
It's going to cause a major break at some point, probably sooner than later.
I still have my Sony Vaio from that period. Its on a shelf covered in stickers and signatures (e.g. Illiad, ESR, Commander Taco/Hemos, etc) as a kind of keepsake, since I suspect it wouldn't even boot up after so many years of not being used.
The amount of abuse I hurled at Carsten Haitzler (Raster) during our time at VA Linux (where he worked on E as well as other stuff) was a complete sitcom unto itself; at one point he debated making a "zeruch insult generator" just to streamline the verbal abuse process.
I loved using the environment but would regularly harangue him for being glib on resource usage. It really was otherwise very ahead of the curve.
"A society unable to tolerate deviance from the norm, is a society that will fail to adapt to inevitable changes to the norm" I feel the same way about societies that continue to fail lessons of history and repeat the same damaging (and often easily avoided) idiocy.
Good riddance. Of all the Unix variants I tried over the years, HP-UX was the second worst (that dishonor goes to Xenix).
I remember giving a talk at Chico State University back in the dotcom era, and got a tour of the CS dept; they had various systems running on Solaris, AIX, etc, all with "normal" naming conventions. But anything with HPUX was named after diseases (e.g. Typhus, Malaria) and the feeling in the dept was not subtle.
Network effects and an as-yet insufficient friction to leave en masse has kept LI in a semi-moated space.
There have been competitors, but they are either niche (Zerply) or more regionally specific (Xing, with its focus on following EU data sovereignty laws) or the latest trend, AI-enabled agentic recruitment, which as yet has no real track record.
1. I have some serious biases against Penguin at the time (for...reasons) and frankly was never impressed with their product.
2. Without getting into a bunch of weird minutiae, we got big enough to be a threat to people who could afford to bleed us; case in point, we started doing incredibly well in HPC clusters, and big vendors like IBM and Dell started to offer severely below cost hardware packaged with their full services that completely undercut a business that already had thin margins.
IMHO, we made better gear at the time, but we were not in a market as wide and deep for linux optimized machines as it is now. It's not an unusual story in the valley. We did have a deep talent bench that ended up in key roles in a bunch of firms that are doing well: Google, Apple, et al.
There is a crucial difference there, and history easily explains why if one bothers.