I have to disagree here, and agree with Tom. Being in the industry, I can attest to the lousiness of MS's products. NT blows chunks, and Windows 9x is a piece of crap, in short. Unix will rule the server space for a long time to come. NT may be fine for what it was designed for - small to mid size LANs. But when you want to do REAL work, you don't use NT. You use Unix. And you use Oracle on Unix, not MSSQL on NT for serious database work.
Im not a MS hater, software is a tool, and you use the best tool for the job. They provided an invaluable service to the popularization of the home computer by providing a uniform, consistent, universal OS platform. But, they have impeded the market by entering into coercive exclusionary agreements with OEMs while providing a shoddy product. What's more, I would argue that MS DOES NOT know its customer better than the competition. The fact that they must use exclusionary tactics to hedge its customers into a Windows world is testament to their lack of faith in competition. They tout their compliance to open standards, while corrupting those standards to exclude non-MS products. Win2k Kerberos is a good example, or MS-CHAP authentication. If Microsoft truly cared about its customers, it would provide open standards compliant products that seamlessly accomodate the needs of a multi-vendor datacenter. They won't do that. They can't afford to do that.
Derek |
