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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (2338)	10/18/2000 12:24:06 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2615

In today's Investor's Business Daily a full page IBM server add touting Linux inside, and IBM services it. The only agenda I ever heard in association with Linux came from Bob Young of Redhat. Let's take the 5 billion dollar OS market to 500 million. This was well pre IPO. The effect of that would indeed hurt msft most. That was not the intent of the agenda it was just a side effect. The real forces that will reduce msft over time is that the msft office suites, the revenue cow is no longer the premier element of increasing employee productivity. That US market is saturated and outside the Us msft is really disliked. This prejudice against msft outside of the US is a competitive advantage short term for the US. Long term I'm not sure. A few years back giving thousands of employees an integrated office suite was a major contributor to productivity gains. The current and next wave is in integrated connectivity products. In the first wave of office suites msft had all things considered a very good solution. In the current wave the msft os and integrated solution is based upon giving away the major application of connectivity and the underlying OS is still behind the connectivity technology of 1994 linux. This big difference in suitability will cause many in server space to come to Liunx as a no brain choice. The words on standards excellence this and than will convince few to adopt Linux over msft in desktop space. In this area the whole and completeness of msft (sound, drivers variety of apps, turbotax ....)will remain for the masses much more attractive than the piecemeal Linux solutions. I can find dozen of Linux distributions for sale and many because of different numbering system of release may not be binary compatible. Book by the dozen are for sale including Linux distribution that will so be out of date. How are any but the techno nerd like you or me ever going to understand this. To me one clear indicator of the collective stupidity of Linux space is in the simple analysis of image viewers. Redhat decided to replace xv with ee and a whole section of gnome is touting eog in the wonderful gnome solution. Well as someone who has worked on ten, twenty thousand images, xv is clearly one of the most elegant applications ever written with a superb integration of window design and layout, smart integration of keyboard commands. Use of mouse with additional metakey functionality and fantastic command auto slide show capability and screen saving and grabing. Every other Linux image viewer is 25% as functional or less and xv was last updated in 1994 and it's shareware. So once again money and ignorance makes for unfocused divergent agendas. In msft space xv can compete and in many areas outshine all image viewing applications. xv is available for nt. So what I conclude is that gnome is a comitee of newbie do gooders with no concept of outstanding and seeking accomadation of the acceptable. Windows 3.1 is ..... Win 95 is .... You just can't say that for Linux. Also No distribution will ever be in a position to dictate by size what Linux is clearly. This is good and this is bad. Now this is the perspective of someone who tries to fly linux to places no one else ever visits. watman.com Tom Watson tosiwmee