Chariman Bill Pontificates!
In a recent interview on Internet News, Chairman Bill had quite a lot to say about a lot of the issues that get discussed on this thread:
internetnews.com
He talks a lot about giving everyone on the Internet a single, seamless, unified platform on which to access information and do transactions. (Gee, which platform could that be?)
Then he goes on to trash a lot of the not-invented-at-Microsoft stuff the internet has begotten.
Some "choice cuts," with editorial comments from the Peanut Gallery:
In our own space, there are all these Unix vendors trying to convince people that the new world of the Internet means they should go back to the old world of dumb terminals.
This is the old Microsoft saw about how everything that doesn't have a 4.1 gig hard drive and 300 mb of ram is a "dumb terminal." I guess a "dumb terminal" really means anything that doesn't run the latest iteration of Windows.
You have a whole raft of existing competitors--IBM, Oracle, Sun, Netscape--and dozens of other startups. A couple of the new companies will do really well.
Notice how Chairman Bill equates companies like IBM, Oracle and Sun with "new startups." He's trying to level the competition by treating all competitors the same. And I guess "a couple of the new companies" will do "really well," but IBM, Oracle, Sun and Netscape won't.
The NC thing is very interesting. Customers don't come to me and say they want to throw everything out and start over. They don't say they'd just love the chance to rewrite all their applications. They
don't say they want to spend even more money on their servers and double or triple their existing network traffic. What they do say is that they want their PCs to be easier to install, manage, and upgrade.
I'd be curious to hear what customers are telling Jim Barksdale or Scott McNealy or even Larry Ellison.
Wouldn't it be nice to have a PC that didn't need upgrading at all?
With all the hype around NCs, if they don't take off, if they remain incompatible with each other as well as with Windows, if they just become replacements for existing terminals and not much more, it's going to be a major blow to the credibility of their supporters.
People will be asking: Did Sun let its workstation market crumble while it diddled around with what turned out to be just another incompatible device? Did Sun and Oracle try to use NCs to justify high-margin servers when the market was rapidly moving to volume pricing in the server market? Should they have helped customers more in their core businesses, maybe spent more time trying to unify Unix instead of introducing more incompatibility?
Here's Microsoft setting NCs up for the fall.
Gee, is Sun letting its workstation market crumble? I didn't know that.
NCs are incompatible, he says. Incompatible with what? With WIndows? Anyone care to comment on that one?
As for unifying Unix, what good has Microsoft done in that department? How about unifying Windows or, better yet, not dividing Java?
What he says about Java is too inflamatory to post here. It would be like shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre. Besides, it would make this post too long. But, just to give everyone an idea of what Chairman Bill thinks of Java, here's just one of many of the inflamatory comments he makes:
When you see how incompatible the NCs are with each other, the "Write once, run anywhere" is not just a myth, it's a disservice to developers. It's more like, "Write once, and hope it runs at all on something."
I'd love to hear what people have to say about this. I think this interview is a broadside attack on Java, NCs, Netscape and just about everything else near and dear to the non-Microsoft folks on this thread. |
