On Fri, Jun 05, 1998 at 09:23:42AM +1000, Frank Lee wrote:
> Interestingly, research in this market shows that most of the IT market
> regards UNIX as out of date and old technology, and NT as the future.
I'm aware that a lot of IT people feel this way. A lot of people
also think garbage like Lotus Notes and Legato Networker are pretty
neat products, too: they buy them by the bucketful. But that doesn't
*make* them good products. (It does, however, encourage them to say
that they're good products if for no other reason than CYA.)
If anything is out-of-date, it's NT, the hideous child of VMS, Windows,
and DOS, all of which are second-rate technologies (to Unix, MacOS,
and CPM respectively). It's at least half a decade behind Unix
and falling farther back, especially as Linux begins to mature and
as Solaris finally gets back to the performance levels once seen
with SunOS. (It's really unclear what will happen with Digital Unix
now that Compaq owns them; and SGI appears to be selling out
to Micro$oft. But BSDI's getting much better with each release.
Still no hope for AIX, possibly the worst Unix implementation
I have ever seen.)
> Unfortunately, most IT managers, CIOs, etc that I've spoken with don't
> seem to have even heard of it. They know the various commercial flavours
> of Unix - Solaris, AIX, etc - but not Linux.
Oh, I completely agree. I'll bet the CIO of a certain mutual fund
company would just flip if anybody told him that I based his firewall
on Linux, and that a *very* large amount of money gets shuffled around
behind it every day, reasonably [*] safe from prying eyes.
A recent Information Week article on Unix's "comeback" -- in fact,
it was mentioned on the cover -- failed to mention Linux. No help there.
Most of the mentions of Linux in PC Week and other publications
use words like "geek" and "hacker" to describe the talent necessary
to install it. That doesn't help, either.
So, yes, I know. IT people throw around meaningless terms like
TCO and ROI and so on, but they haven't got a clue what it really takes
to put together systems and networks that *stay* up. And that aren't
so much Swiss cheese just waiting for a bored cracker to go right
through them. And that are ready to support whatever comes next --
after the web, after SMTP, after HTTP. Much simpler for them to
go mindless and buy Micro$oft, because nobody ever gets fired for it.
But I've seen this all before: for *years*, DEC told everybody that
VMS was a Professional Operating System for Serious Users, and that
BSD Unix was a hack by a bunch of hippies from Berkeley. People
believed it. They bought VMS and just about drove themselves nuts
trying to get it to actually *do* anything other than suck down support
time like a vacuum pump. The result? DEC crumbled. BSD Unix built
the Internet.
I rather suspect that replacing BSD Unix with "Linux" and VMS with "NT"
and running the clock forward a decade will show a similar scenario.
---Rsk
Rich Kulawiec
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[*] Reasonably: No system is invulnerable. But anybody who breaks into
this one will have earned it.
____________________________________________________________________
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now
Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants
If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done
directly from our website for all our lists.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
