>Linux is already there. It's free, it's fast, and it's powerful.
It seems to me very odd that UNIX fans are pro-Linux. SUN must be rather
pissed about this. A free UNIX OS kills SUN's Solaris.
It's very nice that Linux is free. But I wonder how Wall Street analysts
will evaluate Oracle, Sun, and other UNIX-based companies. If these
companies are based on volunteer-based, free, public domain software that is
basically a fad of people who have a deep personal hatred of Bill Gates,
then the stock of these companies will be rather worthless.
Remember Netscape? A browser company? They sold their browser for $40. A lot
of people claim that they really supported Netscape and that they really
hated Microsoft, yet those same people never paid for their browsers.
The same with Linux: if it's free, there's not much basis for running a
business on it. Red Hat can't exist in an environment where they are
competing against free.
At some point, volunteers will get tired of developing something for free
and they'll go on to other things. Linux will be abandoned.
>Y'see, Unix has been given this "hard to use" label for nearly 20
>years now.
Just set your mama down in front of a UNIX machine and see if she can figure
it out. Forget it.
Anyone who has done training knows that one can put a total newbie in front
of a Mac or a Win95 machine and in ten minutes, they can open programs,
write files, save, and print.
>Y'see, techies like systems
>that are easy-to-use *too*, and Unix/Linux would not even be
>remotely close to this popular if it wasn't.
Nonsense. I've worked at both SUN and Silicon Graphics. Not a single
engineer would be caught dead using something that's "easy-to-use."
Linux is apparently being downloaded in large numbers (I say "apparently"
because there's no way of verifying these numbers.) I wonder how many of
these downloads are actually installed. Most likely, people hear that "it's
better," they download it, can't make any sense of it, and go back to
Windows/Mac. I can't imagine that any sysadmin would seriously convert an
office of 100 users from Win95 or Mac to UNIX. The training, support, and
trouble-shooting would be phenomenal.
But this story has already been told. Silicon Graphics' engineers insisted
that its workstations were the best and that it had to be UNIX. They ignored
the customer, in fact, they despised the customer. If the customer couldn't
use UNIX, they had no business using an SGI workstation. SGI manuals were
nearly useless; one knew how to use the machine because one had a degree in
computer science. The world's largest installation of SGI machines was at...
SGI. The product was used mostly to develop the product. Since they had such
a vicious hatred of Microsloth, Windoze, M$ products, and Wintel, they
didn't pay attention to their competitor.
And so it happened that Intel machines with Windows NT became faster and
cheaper than SGI workstations. They were launching $15,000 workstations to
compete against $1,200 Windows machine that were also faster. In less than
two years, NT captured 50% of SGI's market. It is one of the most remarkable
business disasters. SGI destroyed itself by ignoring its own market. SGI
fired thousands of workers, their new building has not yet been completed,
thousands more abandoned SGI. Now, SGI is an NT company. Yep. They develop
for Windows NT. They've given up their own chips too.
SGI won't be able to do another Apple: they don't have Apple's customer
loyalty. SGI customers were engineers and they only care about speed. They
were not brand loyal.
___________________________________________________
Andreas Ramos [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.andreas.com
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