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Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

Management is just responding to idiot end-users. I have been on plenty of sales calls where customers ask if features X,Y,Z are available, knowing that there’s a 99% chance they’ll never need them, but they ask anyway just because they’ve heard that someone else used a feature like that at some point in the past. If it’s not, they just assume the software is inferior.

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And in B2B or B2G you have customers with checklists of features they don't actually need because the person who wrote the checklist is friends with or paid by a particular supplier, or just operating on old information.

That's how you get Windows subsystem for POSIX. Someone in the government had a checklist saying they'd only buy a POSIX compliant operating system, so Microsoft made one. Amusingly, Linux isn't (mostly because who would pay for that certification?)

Building on standards like POSIX prevents vendor lock-in, which is beneficial in the long run because it prevents the vendor from holding you hostage once you start relying on the system. It's a sensible requirement.

Microsoft's deliberately useless POSIX support is a result of Microsoft acting in bad faith and sabotaging the efforts, as usual, because the lock-in is what they want. Just like they did with OpenDocument, for example. And what they tried to do with Java and the web.

It's also because POSIX is completely useless.

Absolutely, but I think that just circles back around to the core point made upthread that we need to address the underlying causes of that behavioral pattern. The customers are often subject to some manner of utterly moronic performance metric where ticking off a list of features without applying critical thought is strongly incentivized.

It seems to me to be a behavioral pattern with deep seated cultural roots. How many times have you found someone you were interacting with becoming frustrated or impatient when he couldn't immediately grasp a complex topic? How frequently have you witnessed that directly resulting in corners being cut in order to "just get on with things"? When some plurality of participants are either unwilling to spend the time they have, or are short on time, or both, the careless attitude proceeds to cascade through the network.

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