Re: OS DBMS vs commercial software Was: troll

Serge Rielau wrote:

> I do not see Linux desktops (yet) outside of the geeky area ...
Unfortunately that is true, it's very pleasant to work with linux desktops, I use it al the time at work and even in private. But no marketing means (nearly) no customers.

> ... and I don't
> see how Linux has knocked teh commercial OS vendors over technologically.
There a number of implementations in the linux OS which are yet to be announced in future versions of other OS's. Furthermore some implementations are better handled in The OSS than in the commercial counterparts. Again I use the example of Samba. Samba has all the abilities of the microsoft SMB implementation, and then some. Next to that Samba outperformed win 2003 SMB with a factor 3 in speed. (this is just one example)

> Note however how Microsoft is struggling to incite customers to upgrade.
> There is little to be gained technologically by going from one version
> of Windows to the next for the vast majority of desktop users.
Yes.. this is again obvious in the upcoming Windows Longhorn/Vista. Compared to the first announcement, a numerous of new revolutionary parts have been dropped (one of them was bash-like scripting). If you subtract that from the initial presentation, you'll get a polished XP.

> To most Windows 2000 was good enough. The moment Linux desktops
> environment catch up with W2k and that is widely known I'd expect MS
> #installations to tank unless they go free themselves because MS has no
> where to go with the desktop.

This will most likely never happen, at least not through linux. Almost no one I know has even heard of linux (or they have and don't even know how to pronounce it, or even call it lunix (c64 unix)) Without marketing, linux will stay what it is; a geeky os.

> If you look at DBMS again vendors are trying to avoid the trap by moving
> upstream into "Information Integration" and "Content management" (see
> IBM's shopping spree) and Apps (Peoplesoft, Retek). Not moving upstream
> to provide value means getting clobbered by the mySQL et al.
It would be ludicrous to use a vast system like DB2 or Oracle for use of a CMS which displays some newsitems. Talk about a waste of potential. The fact is that the OS db's are shifting towards OLTP (this is the hard one) and Data warehousing. (another fact is that they are not there yet)

> Cheers
> Serge

-R- Received on Thu Aug 04 2005 - 08:11:10 CDT