Re: Which OS is better?

I think you need to prioritize the importance of all the desired production-system attributes and only thereafter make the O.S. choice. Right off the top of my head I can think of a dozen you might want to be concerned with -- you know, all the "Ility" sisters such as manageability, reliability, scalability, affordability, et al. Only YOUR shop can rate these in their proper order and therefore only YOUR shop can make the choice of OS. This is usually a very strategic decision and is usually made by a CTO or CIO since he's the one who's supposed to have the company's business model burned into his memory as well as an understanding of where the vendors are going; he's usually the one spending thousands of dollars a year for white-paper subscriptions from the big consulting tanks to help him understand the latter. He's also the one who will drive the ROI/NPV analyses which are mandatory pre-decision exercises.

I have seen CIOs lose their $150K-200K jobs because, being overly-concerned with price and insufficiently-concerned with reliability, they chose a toy OS. I've seen others lose their jobs because they chose industrial-strength OSes when there just weren't the NET dollars to maintain the support infrastructure nor the need for five-nines uptime.

If you pick only one attribute there MIGHT be a reasonable consensus as to which OS is best, but with the dozen or so you must consider, forget it.

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Before you buy. Received on Thu Feb 03 2000 - 13:26:55 CST