Mark; I had seen the Unix group as quite fragmented, with every licencee customizing their flavor, so they could get a captive client base. Perhaps my concept is dated and they have become more interoperable. I had though that you needed to get each application slightly fiddled with to run on each variant. Linux being a very basic standard form with little customizing may well run on more systems than a funny variant from Bull of France, known for their customizing.
The holy grail is one universal tongue, faint hope, althoug the Wintel standard is geting so dominant that by the time that Win9x and Win NT converge in the early 2000's they will own 95% of all new desktops sold.
I had some thought a while ago that an operating system could be made by Netscape, but I think not. The promise of Java as a universal language seems to be foundering on a sea of differences, like the Unix problems that effectively destroyed Unix' chance to be where Win9x/NT are arriving now.
With Gates you get a standard we all run, at a low price(although the price as a % of system costs is rising, in 1985, DOS/WIN was $100 and a syatem was $5000. It is now $125 on a system of $1000 cost, a 6 fold price increase based on system costs)
I would like to see Microsoft split into an OS seller, an application maker, and a hardware vendor. This would remove some conflict from the market. As it is now the absolute OS monopoly profits are used to kill netscape, Corel, Novell, and a hundred more whose apps were absorbed by the bloated blob of Win9x/NT.
So the monopoly has cut competition, and Gates has bribed us into complacence with our own money by seeming not to take a monopoly price gouge position on the OS(but he does in all the Apps, where they have gone up hugely, ask any corporate client with 1000 desks using office 97/98)
I suspect that it will be hard to get a CPU competition like Intel/AMD/Cyrix in the Apple CPUs, but it is possible if IBM joins in the fray to make a broadly sold Apple in co-operation with Apple, along the lines I have mentioned so many times before.
But will they open their eyes?, IBM has a proprietary history, but they had a hard lesson with Microchannel, and they might come onside.
The harder sell will be those in Apple who want a proprietary fortress within which they can keep their high margins, and they do not see the barbarians at the gate!!
Bill |
