<snip>
> My thinking behind this revolved around the fact that I have been developing
> to Microsoft platforms of one kind or another since they were invented.
> First DOS (obviously) then eventually Windows. While no O/S vendor can
> claim to have a perfect system - like it or not, Windows is the pervasive
> technology - period. (You Linux lurkers can flame me if you want - you know
> I'm right).
Actually, I think you're wrong. I don't believe that the desktop-orientation
as practiced by MS is going to be the direction of the future. Let us not
forget how slow they were to cotton-on to the power of the 'net. They
were focusing on the workgroups with their own servers powering the
enterprise (sound familiar?). That orientation also provided fertile
ground for worm and virus developers.
Far better to embrace the "thin-client" (read: browser) model. Why do
you think MS tried to "commoditize" (REF: the Halloween documents) the
Java language: it threatened their monopoly. We're approaching a time
when all the back-end systems will have to interoperate. MS might call
it .NET but it's really just XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. So why would you
need a proprietary GUI? In B2B applications, the GUI doesn't even
exist!
I'm not suggesting for a moment that people are going to abandon MS
for Linux on the desktop en-masse but you have to admit that a server
of a particular performance level will actually be more efficient
as a file-server running Linux/Samba than NT.
The proof is in the pudding, as they say.
Received on Fri Jan 10 2003 - 02:53:38 CST
