Zander is a pretty clever guy but he knows better. He says "NT, to me, has always been a Microsoft desktop small server in that working environment -- you know, the de facto standard for your desktop. "
But Ed knows enough history to understand that NT is the architectural descendent of VMS - (even the name, WNT, happens to be the next letters in the alphabet substituted for VMS). VMS is hardly a desktop OS. NT was originally designed as a server-only OS, and was only re-treaded as a desktop OS shortly before the product was launched. IMO most of NT's problems came from a misguided attempt to make it run as a desktop OS supporting the broad range of applications that exist for the PC. But that's not what Ed said.
His comments about the desktop mentality at MSFT are well taken - MSFT has only just begun to address the issues they will need to face to do enterprise-class support. But my sense is that's not exactly where MSFT is going.
Finally, his comment about the number of people who touch Solaris versus the number who touch NT is clearly disingenuous, given the numbers of NT seats out there compared to Solaris. Sure, SUNW can make a valid claim that most of the traffic on the net touches a Solaris machine at some point - but given their strong position in telco switch applications, CPQ could probably make a similar claim. It does not mean that most of those same people don't also touch an NT machine.
SUNW has a great story at the moment, but not as good as the SUNW propaganda machine would have us believe. I was at a meeting in 1995 with some senior SUNW people where they said that they intended to position NT as the "toy" OS, with a list of bullet points similar to those pounded into this thread by the various SUNW supporters. That propaganda position has only increased over the years, and especially in the last few months.
BTW, did anyone notice that the SUNW UE10000 TPC number was pushed out of the top 10 in performance - the only remaining SUNW TPC number is last on the list - a rather embarrassing 135K clustered UE6500 number which only serves to highlight the fact that the cost per TPM-C is 5 times the CPQ numbers and twice anything else on the list.
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