To get one thing clear, Dell boxes running NT rarely crash, at least in my experience. I leave my NT 4 running on an old P133 (that I built) for weeks at a time with no problem. It is even more stable on a Dell 266 PII laptop with 128 mb ram. I'm not saying it does not blue screen, but that is after months, not days - and during some heavy beta development, the type of stuff that brings down the OS on Sun's and other Unix's as well. NT is not as stable as Solaris on Unix, but it is definitely not a slouch for the money. I have the Win 2000 candidate release 2, and it appears that MSFT will much rather be late in shipping than release something less stable than Solaris on the Sparc. That should give some Sun worshippers slight pause at least, for if they succeed, commidization will come to Sun in a big way - and in a way that I don't think Sun can handle in the short term. They will have to cut costs on the workstation software and hardware side, and not be able to recoup the costs on the server like they have in the last year or two, because Wintel will be their as well.
As for the wait and see mentality, Sun pulls this with thier year and a half announcement of the Sparc III, the NC that has yet to pan out, and most likely Star Portal, which is not released yet although its competitor is already shipping a beta. My point here is every company announces early, and they all make promises. Sun is far from the exception. MSFT has a long history of delivering on their promises. That is why NT is a big force in the enterprise, where it did not even exist four and a half years ago. That is why SQL 7 is the 2nd largest selling DB on the NT platform and the fourth largest overall. That is why MSFT's history is littered with companies who didn't believe that MSFT would deliver. I know for a fact that Scott McNeally is smarter than to underestimate MSFT (and their two defacto, and extremely well managed partners - INTC and DELL), but it appears that many on this thread are doing so in their zeal to see Sun succeed. |
