The IT industry is shifting away from Microsoft

The Inquirer ^ | Sunday 28 December 2003 | Charlie Demerjian

[SkyRat]

I agree.

I've got two PC's. One running XP and the other SuSe Linux.
On both machines runs Opera. Excellent product, IMHO

No pop-ups anymore. Yeah :-)

[Quix]

THANKS TONS.

I FIGURED THERE *SHOULD* BE A WAY AROUND IT.

WILL DO.

BLESS YOU AND YOURS IN THE NEW YEAR.

[sinkspur]

The appealing design of Apple's hardware and the stability of OS X are sure to convince some in the avant-garde it's time to buy real computers.

You may be right about Linux, but, please, do not make me laugh about people switching to Apple.

[rdb3]

Your.... kung fu.... is slow.... and the Style Of.... The Penguin .... is weak.

Ah, so... But you... don't... realize... the power of Penguin with... MATRIX!

EEE, YA!

[B Knotts]

Agree with you on that.

Apple is a niche product because of its price premium (not as bad as it used to be, but still there).

Microsoft has a price premium over Linux (even taking TCO into account, long-term). Its market inertia results in a reluctance to switch to another platform, but it can only stave it off, not postpone it indefinitetly, IMO. As its server market dwindles, it makes it harder to maintain lock-in on the desktop, especially as Linux GUIs continue to improve. Or so I see it.

[Quix]

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO CIGAR.

IT'S *NOT* about the START program. It's about the list of programs, software packages etc.

How can I enlarge that capacity?

BTW, EVEN THOUGH the start program was not the problem, I still did what you said--no effect.

[Glenn]

This reflects who runs what server - which is where companies live and die, rather that the zero profit browser market.

That's for web applications only. The company I work for runs tens of thousands of servers, many of which are application rather than web servers. My company will not live or die based on web servers alone.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

But Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 just came out

Did it? I thought it was released several months ago. I know the White Box was released near the beginning of December I thought but RHEL 3.0 was available before that. My bad.

Even still, the point is, there aren't as many customers looking for product support for other platforms as there are looking for certification of the latest MS products. And there hasn't been a decrease in the margin. Quite the opposite. A lot more MS implementations going through these days. I chose RHEL 3 as the latest/greatest Linux product we see customers asking for certification on.

[YoungKentuckyConservative]

Last I checked everyone and everything is running Windows. Sure, about 5% of the power servers will be running alternatives. But it sure isn't "shifting" away from Microsoft. They've had and still have one of the best business plans and models ever "legally" allowed to exist. =)

[Quix]

IT'S about the list of all the software programs I have on my computer that comes up when I click "PROGRAMS."

[prolusion]

Instead of creating software chaos once again, we must focus upon fixing the problems within the Microsoft operating system.

Microsoft arose when the home computer market took off. A time when system resources were nonexistent. When top of the line pc clones had what, 640k memory, and 10-20 Megabyte drives. How to fit an OS into those restraints? Simple, strip any and all unnecessary standard features till you have a monolithic skeleton devoid of multiuser functionality, including security.

Billy Innovator's port of then existing computer science is incapable of maturing into tommorows OS without a complete overhaul. As this article alludes to, the prospect of doing this with 'free' and posix compliant alternatives is ludicrous. Good luck Billy Boy.

Besides, I prefer viable competition. Keeps the players on guard.

Focus upon fixing the problems within the Microsoft operating system? More lipstick will not work.

[Wonder Warthog]

"Anecdotal facts that are not scientifically sampled."

Uh, with a sample size of 400,000, you get a statistically valid result without "scientific sampling", unless he has "cherry-picked" a subset of his entire data set to present--which I doubt is the case.

[MetalMan]

Why spend money at a software store when you can get top-of-the-line products for free? If you can buy it, GNU's got 30 products that'll work just the same, if not better.

[Snerfling]

I get the same type of stats for a popular accounting/finance news/information web site I developed. The whole thing was written in PHP using MySQL as the backend - however, the user stats indicate that around 90% of the visitors are using Explorer.

Because it was self-financed, I never considered developing the site on anything other than Linux. I'm working with a client right now that made a choice to go with ASP a few years ago. I could never afford the expense of maintaining my site faced with the same instability/program conflicts and other related problems they deal with week-in and week-out.

[Nick Danger]

Billy Innovator's port of then existing computer science is incapable of maturing into tommorows OS without a complete overhaul.

That's not really fair. NT counts as a "complete overhaul" compared to the "DOS with a GUI bolted on" that Microsoft started with. Cutler & crew were pretty competent architecture types. I never saw the inside of NT, but I'm sure the original design was at least as slick as UNIX.

The question is to what extent the practical necessities of getting real products out the door have compromised the design and turned it into the same sort of "forest of kludges" that Win9X had become. I suspect there is at least some of that, which may impact how well it scales. I notice we do not see Windows products on the bigger boxes.