I have no doubt that your reasons for Unix failure in the MS dominated desktop
market is true, what you have explained is what the situation was, which gave MS
there opportunity to take what they now have.
My reference to "the Unix vendors were divided against themselves" is simply
that while they were focused on each other, MS was allowed to go unchallenged
and gain there foot hold into the market. It was not impossible for Unix
vendors to challenge MS and produce an alternative, infact they were too short
sited to see the threat MS posed. It took a Scandinavian Penguin Lover (Linus)
and other Heroes to prove that Unix has a place on the desktop, when Unix
vendors chose to overlook this.
What I was trying to get across in this thread was that while we are fighting
trivial battles like which package management software is better or even worst
which flavor of Linux is better i.e. Linux people divided against themselves,
MS and its like can only gain from this.
Ask not what we can do for Mandrake or Debian, but ask what we can do for
Linux! :)
Amien
--
No Fate But What U Make...
On Thu, 22 Jun 2000, you wrote:
> On Wed, 21 Jun 2000, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 20, 2000 at 11:53:32PM +0200, Amien Salie wrote:
> > > Someone once posed the question,
> > > " Why did Unix fail where Microsoft succeeded?"
> > > And the simple answer to this was ....
> > > "the Unix vendors were devided against themselves"
> >
> > And the simple answer is simply dead wrong.
> >
> > A better answer would be to look at what were at that time the targetted
> > markets, the price of the different softwares, the requirements on hardware
> > and the price of such hardware...
>
> Heh. True. At the time Windows was making inroads into business, you
> needed a mainframe (or at the least an extremely powerful PC) to run Unix.
> Your average desktop machine just didn't have the power. Unix on the
> desktop wasn't really a possibility until very recently (relatively
> speaking -- seems recent to me, but I've been computing since 1982; ah
> the heady days of the 16K computer plugged into the TV, those were the
> days). If someone hadn't been kind enough to drop a SPARCstation on my
> desk for free during the early 90's, I'd have never spent the money on
> a Unix workstation. Today, it's actually cheaper to build a Unix box
> (thanks to Micros~1 Windows license fees). Funny how things change...
