One of the things that makes MSFT's OS so significant is all the applications out there that run off their windows platform.
Can you elaborate on Linux applications and how they fare vs. windows?
At the moment, Windows applications have a firm hold on the desktop. In particular, it is Microsoft that has the lion's share of the market in these applications, e.g. PowerPoint, Excel, MS Word, MS Office, etc.
Where Linux, and Red Hat in particular, is making inroads is in the server market. You can get the entire Red Hat distribution which comes with Apache Web Server installation, operation, and maintenance tools. This is the most-used HTTP server on the web. Other network applications for mail, news, e-commerce, etc. are available. Oracle and Informix have their products available, and I believe Sybase does, or is working on it.
Internal Linux corporate file servers are much more reliable and require less maintenance than NT servers. How many times have you been working at your NT box and gotten the Blue Screen of Death. The fact that it has a name and the people IMMEDIATELY know what you are talking about says that this has happened to many people many times. Is this how you want your corporate file, database, or web server to act?
There is a growing number of applications for the desktop, e.g. Applix and WordPerfect, scientific programs like Mathematica, Maple, MatLab, S-Plus. For software developers, a Linux box is an inexpensive alternative to a Sun SPARC or SGI workstation on which real work can be done.
You can bet that Microsoft is not going to offer its products for Linux anytime soon, but as the number of hosts running Linux increases, it is becoming worthwhile for other companies to build their software for Linux. This is especially true now that there are companies that maintain stable distributions of Linux that they can build against, and Red Hat has the largest name recognition of any of these companies.
Regards,
Doug
P.S. Does anyone know if AOL has IM software or software for Linux AOL logins yet? -D. |
