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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: keithsha who wrote (46200)	6/7/2000 11:03:00 PM
From: ProDeath	Respond to of 74651

Rest assured that business is being done in the Fortune 500 on Linux. I know of one company in particular, however, I am not at liberty to use their name for this purpose. If you want to call me a liar, go ahead, I'll just consider the source. As far as Sun's stuff goes, it's okay. I find HP makes a faster database platform for the money and AIX is somewhere in the running as well. SGI makes some really fast hardware and does a fine job for database serving. The really great thing is that I can use substantially the same third-party and in-house developed software on any of these unix platforms, and not get shat upon by a vendor intent on forcing out competition for having done so. There's plenty of support for applications from both sides when you are running unix. Application vendors know that they can succeed in delivering something that actually works if unix is the platform. On Windows, they only can hope to deliver something that isn't any worse than their competition's Windows software, and hope that changes in the MS platform do not just happen to affect their product. On the other hand, with MS one faces the continuing uncertainty that this year's product will be supported next year without a forced upgrade to possibly immature software. Remember MS Lan Manager when NT 3.1 fell out the door bleeding profusely from both ears? I saw the latter drive quite a few MS LM shops to IBM Lan Server, which was an even better thing in that IBM is also a credible unix vendor and customers had the opportunity to move up to the industrial-strength blend with the same vendor. I can foresee a time when the MS vanity quest to be a IT vendor is past and the company recognizes its natural niche as a toy manufacturer. When this happens, whither those who built their castles on the sand of Microsoft products?

To: keithsha who wrote (46200)	6/8/2000 2:37:00 AM
From: SunSpot	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Well, now the fun part comes. A typical Red Hat Linux distribution is, what people would call a "Linux". Software, that runs on Linux is "Linux software". Oracle is Linux software. The good thing about Linux is, that you can replace every single part with a commercial component if you want. Many people exchange the kernel with FreeBSD (Web servers), Sun Solaris, HP Unix etc. The same business software that runs on Linux also runs on Sun Solaris. No company would ever demand a Linux kernel on a server, if something else would be better. And yes, there are plenty of Unix servers out there running serious software. If you start with a 32MB RAM Linux server with an SQL-server (Oracle, Interbase), you can upgrade to pretty big Unix machines. This is, what companies actually do. I don't want to do research for you about finding which companies actually do transactions on Linux - but I'm sure the Oracle sales department or Interbase Corp. would like to point out a few for you. A single Linux server still has better uptime than Windows NT. According to IBM and, I think, Gartner Group, a typical NT server is not accessible 240 hours a year in average, for several reasons. As far as I remember, the figures for Linux were 30 hours. The main reason for downtime with the servers I have set up is lack of airconditioning and somebody pulling the power plug. I've never had downtime because of software upgrades. I didn't say anything else than that those 4000 computers at Google were doing webcrawling, but that's not quite the truth. There are 4000 computers, that get web-pages, analyze these, evalutate pages based on other pages and provides this to the end-user. It's a rather complicated system, and it's a real life system. You asked for example, you got it. Now you don't like the example and ask for another. You could probably go on for a very long time... Of course, you could do this with Windows. The fact is, though, nobody does this on Windows. You don't see 4000 computers working together on a task in the Windows world, unless it's some kind of technical demo.