Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Monday, May 20, 2002
01:09 - Against all odds...	(top)
On the ever-widening subject of the "Warriors-vs-Soldiers" metaphor espoused over at USS Clueless and responded to here (scroll down a few entries), and in response to my statement (regarding Apple) that "When you're outnumbered twenty to one, you'd better be warriors and not soldiers-- it takes different tactics," James A. Wolf writes me thus: Two words... Rourke's Drift. Rourke's Drift was an 1879 Boer War battle in which fewer than 200 British soldiers fought off an onslaught by some four thousand Zulu warriors. As has been discussed in Carnage and Culture by Victor David Hanson, and also in James O. Gump's The Dust Rose Like Smoke (which I remember reading in college), the British won through being disciplined and steadfast, rather than by adopting unconventional ("warrior-like") tactics to counter what was actually a very well-organized attack (the Zulu were trained under Shaka and Mzilikazi, brilliant tacticians by any standards). So where I had suggested that any vastly outnumbered party is well served by going "warrior", it would seem that we have a good counter-argument here. But the other half of Gump's book, discussed in opposition to the Rourke's Drift battle, is Custer's Last Stand. The numbers of Custer's cavalry and the Sioux fighters were fairly comparable to those of the British and Zulu, and the fighting tactics of the respective sides were similar. And as we know, Custer's column was annihilated. They were outnumbered, they fought like soldiers, and they lost badly. Granted, the difference between the outcomes of these two battles can be ascribed to the quality of the leadership as much as to anything else; Custer and his lieutenants were ineffectual and incompetent, whereas the British command at Rourke's Drift were highly professional. But these are both such isolated cases that it's hard to tell what of the many variables involved had a hand in determining the battles' outcomes, and which ones didn't matter. (For instance, Custer's unit and the Sioux both had fairly similar rifles to fight with-- but the Zulus were using spears and shields against an entrenched nest of Martini-Henrys and Lee-Metfords. And Gatling guns.) It seems to me, though, that there's some difference rooted in whether the outnumbered party is defending or attacking. A highly regimented but small force can hold off a much larger attacking party that is less well disciplined. Rourke's Drift illustrates this success, and the WTC is perhaps the converse-- a small group of guerrillas on the attack, drawing down unstoppable regimented and soldierly force in retaliation. But when the outnumbered party is on the defensive, well... history is full of examples of where guerrilla warfare has succeeded in defending against an attacking or occupying force of regimented and disciplined soldiers. The mujahedin drove out the Russians from Afghanistan. The American Revolutionary militia drove out the British. William Wallace mowed down the English army in Scotland. In each of these cases, it was unconventional tactics and individual initiative that really spurred victory for the outnumbered warriors-- who, if they had behaved like well-trained soldiers, probably wouldn't have had a chance. Now, this whole argument goes rather beyond my original intent, which was simply to extend the metaphor which Steven den Beste began-- that Microsoft and Dell are soldiers, getting the job done with no fuss and no muss; while Apple is a warrior, shaking its AK-47 in the air and ranting about ideals, which drives off as many potential converts to its cause as it attracts. It's not really clear whether the Apple guerrilla warriors are on the defensive or the offensive; it seems that it depends on who you ask. PC users will probably claim that Apple is under attack, defending an ever-shrinking piece of ground. But Mac users, watching all the new product announcements and using the new hardware and riding the current euphoric wave, will tend to say that Apple is on the attack. Whether or not it means (historically) that it would give us a good fighting chance, we who see Apple as being on the offensive are probably more willing to defend Apple's "warrior" stance, because of how much more romantic it is and how well it meshes with ideals and reality. (Chris (a Linux man), interestingly, was pondering the above division while I was out of the room-- and when I came back in, he had come to the disturbing realization that because he saw Apple as being on the attack, that meant he was on Apple's side. Interesting Rorschach's test, there.) But, again, I'm leery of applying these military metaphors too directly to the behavior of technology companies. The reason I extended den Beste's metaphor was to illustrate that if Apple were as pallid and un-showmanlike as, say, IBM or Dell, then nobody would be a Mac fan or an Apple zealot, and the company would be long gone. It's on the strength of a segment of the computer industry who applauds Apple's flamboyant, "warrior-like" behavior that Apple continues to exist at all. We like being part of what feels like a revolution, cheering Steve Jobs as he shakes his AK-47 up on stage. It's because we believe in the same ideals of computing and technology that he does that we've aligned ourselves with his company; and if that company behaved like everybody else, we wouldn't be touching it with a ten-foot pole. That's all I meant.