Better NetWare late than NT never infoworld.com
I haven't been posting much from the infoworld brigade of the press division of the nefarious international ilk conspiracy lately, but I thought Bearded One at least would enjoy this piece. This is (editor I think) Michael Vizard, who tends to bend over backward to be fair to Microsoft, really- I don't recall posting much of his stuff. He notes that Novell's delivery of Netware 5 may mark a major detour on the road to Windows World. Sounds good to me, though I can't say too much about that personally, I've always disavowed knowledge of Novell.
This means that for the foreseeable future, we can expect to see heterogeneous, multitier enterprise computing architectures dominating the IT landscape. NetWare will continue to be the dominant provider of file and print services, Unix and mainframe systems will continue to host most of the data, and NT 4.0 will be used as the primary platform for application servers that need low- to medium-range scalability.
The bad news for Redmond is that the company's Uber-NT vision overall, also known as Microsoft's Digital Nervous System, is pretty much kaput without a credible NT 5.0 story to back it up. And once more, by the time Microsoft gets around to delivering NT 5.0, most IT shops will be pretty comfortable with multitier computing architectures. So the promise of a homogenous NT infrastructure won't seem quite as compelling in 2001.
Well, that's fine for DNS, but what about the more insidious DNA retrovirus, lurking in a water supply near you? At least I'm starting to see the DNA/DNS distinction, DNA= 8500+ Windows APIs for the world to standardize on (all "open" in some Microsoftese sense, I'm sure), DNS= one morbidly obese middleware OS for everyone, to run those 8500+ Windows APIs on. Or maybe it's still beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, and only Bill knows what it really means. They're his "initiatives", you know. Anyway, the somewhat garbled conclusion:
So the question is, has Microsoft been humbled enough to start doing the right thing to support IT diversity, or are is the company merely taking a more practical approach with tools such as Visual Studio 6.0 as it waits for the next available opportunity in the new millennium?
I'm sure Microsoft will do "the right thing", in some neologistic sense of the phrase anyway.
Cheers, Dan. |
