Stak,
I'm surprised that your asking Cheryl since she works for Sun. If you don't mind an opinion from someone who might have an idea... My honest opinion is that I think Microsoft knows what they need to do with NT 5.0. Sun, Novell, and others are scared s***less that it'll be a raging success, and I believe it will. You don't think the lawsuits are about Java and value for consumers do you?
It will take a huge effort to finish making NT 5.0 as reliable as it needs to be, and that's the work that's going on at MSFT every day. Will it be reliable out of the gate? I believe so. Will there be a service pack? Probably so. Even though Sun would have you believe that Solaris is perfectly reliable, they also have service packs or OS patches, etc. Even if it takes until after 2000 for NT 5.0 to really take off in the marketplace (and I mean REALLY take off), NT will continue to take market share away from Sun and other Unix vendors. Just to give you an idea of what's happening now, according to IntelliQuest, 56% of intranet web apps are NT server based and 70% of new intranets are built with NT server. According to Netcraft, 50% of the new eCommerce sites being built are based on NT Server and IIS. These numbers are quite respectable, and that's all pre-NT 5.0.
Even if NT 5.0 doesn't completely overtake the market until after 2000, a lot's going to happen before then. There's Office 2000 and always the occasional Microsoft surprise. I know Linux is an excellent system, and while it does have RAS, I don't think it's going to catch up to NT in usability. NT on the other hand will be as reliable and scalable as any Unix on the market.
Of course, I work for Microsoft, and you might consider me biased even though I'm really expressing my honest opinion. If you want an unbiased opinion from someone outside the company, I think Rudedog's posts have been closest to the mark.
Mike |
