Richard -
Wow! Well we can always wait for Win2000? Good or bad I was very, very happy
when little-old Microsoft stomped on IBM's toes, Win 3.1 kicked OS2 in the butt,
and the WINTEL fueled information revolution took off. Then, many of us were
very worried that we would all too soon be working for IBM.
Its been an incredible 15(?) years from the increment from TRS80 and Apple IIes
to the WINTELs we all seem to be making our livelihood with. My bet is
Microsoft will be broken up and very likely the resulting competition will be
very dangerous going for small firms as well as large. But then the best thing
that ever happened to Standard Oil was its breakup - buy Microsoft now fool!
I can not do much about Microsoft but hold its stock. For me I watch how ESRI
seems to be getting ever closer to Microsoft having seen their un-holy trinity
of ESRI-Oracel-SUN now broken. Jack may have met his match....
The sun is shining out there. Oracle seems to be making their spatial run with
MapInfo technology - SDE has a much limited future, SUN sees a growing avalanche
of LINTEL workstation plus their slow but certain loss of control over JAVA, and
ESRI must make their AkeExploiter free in order to hold their users.
ESRI's SDE and SDE-Lite is targeted for Microsoft's SQL-Server (Whew, I was
worried for a moment).
For me I recall that when MapInfo long ago made a run at Microsoft we thought
Excel DataMap would be an opportunity but we got Professional 3.5 and a more
stable environment for all the neat things the MI developer community has since
spunout. Now the Troyites have seen the internet as being dominated by Oracle
and its 8i. They hooked an incredible opportunity when Oracle jumped on JAVA and
Lunix has appeared. Spatialware is really good stuff but still a year out for
the masses. MapInfo's focus on investment into JAVA and internetization of
business computing looks to give us new insights and opportunity. JAVA while
not perfect does offer some very interesting balance going into the next decade.
And to close - for all of your friends growing moss up there in the rain-forest,
we have some really great opportunities for skilled programmers over here at the
foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Spatial Multimedia? Send your resume to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
MidNight Mapper
aka Neil
8/19/99
"Richard E. Hoskins" wrote:
> There is bigger issue. Microsoft OS is junk......
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