Fair enough, but my broad point is that due to the need for multiple servers to get NT to scale, and due to the fact that it looks like, despite its limitations, NT is becoming the de facto standard for new server, network, data warehousing implementations, the future of box makers is guaranteed as MSFT will not be able to make NT any simpler. It is simply not enough to get more powerful hardware as NT and SQL server have inherent limitations that are hardware independent (For example greater than 4 way multi processing requires extra software from Tandem or other vendors).
BTW, the low initial cost of NT and PC servers make it into an easy choice for companies. They do not realize that much more hardware is required to scale up. Also there are a lot of hidden support costs due to the fact that NT is not as reliable as Unix for example.
Your argument is about falling hardware prices making PCs into cheap commodities. I'm saying that, thanks to the dominance of MSFT, there will still be lots of growth in the server market so companies like DELL can stay in the corporate market and leave the consumer market to Sony etc.
To simplify: Consumer market and business market will diverge dramatically as consumer PCs become more like most other electrical consumer goods, and more complex servers (clustering for scalability and failover recovery, etc.) proliferate in the corporate world.
So your predictions are true about the consumer market but untrue in the context of the business world. |
