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

To: alydar who wrote (64300)	1/20/2002 6:26:24 PM
From: dybdahl	Respond to of 74651

That is true - I agree that Solaris is winning right now - but when you look at how IT usage develops, and how Linux develops, Linux will be able to do the task most of the places where Solaris is being used today, in a not too far future. In other words, Solaris is gaining now, but will loose in the long end. SUNW may survive - there is always the need for enterprise quality support, hardware and software, and SUNW already delivers Linux for that market. Linux has shown to become less fragmented over time. If you had read Eric Raymonds book, you would have read about the software life cycle in Open Source development: - First, programmers address an issue. Several programs are created. - Then, some of these programs is being supported by other programmers and evolve quicker. A selection is made in this phase. - After that, the programs may be selected by a distribution, by GNU, or somehow else be assigned a special status, which will attract more developers and make it more difficult for the other similar programs to get known. - When the program has reached a certain level of functionality, development slows down and becomes bug fixing and other small adjustments. Since the basic design principle in Open Source is, that the perfect design is, when you cannot remove any more, programs only have to reach a certain functionality. Do less, but do it better. Advanced functionality is then made by combining less advanced functionality. It is very interesting to watch the transition of StarOffice from version 5.2 to 6.0 (OpenOffice.org), and Netscape's transition from version 4.x to 6.x (Mozilla 1.0). The company Netscape chose to release an early beta version as their version 6.0 - a choice not praised by many in the Open Source community, and not liked by many Netscape fans. But the result was that: Netscape 6.x is available as Netscape 6.x, Galeon, K-Meleon, Nautilus, Gnome Help and Mozilla. StarOffice 6.0 will be available as StarOffice 6.0, OpenOffice.org version 1.0 (I think that will be the version number), Gnome OpenOffice 1.0, and probably some other names. The basic functionality is the same, the file format compatibility is 100%, but it the different versions are targeted at specific uses. You may call it fragmentation, but it's not fragmentation when it comes to compatibility, like it was with Unix. Galeon, for instance, requires you to install Mozilla first. Simply because it's the same. It is much less fragmented as Windows CE, XP Embedded, NT4/2000/XP, Win95/98/Me, and Microsoft seems to do fine. If you will call Linux fragmented, you will also have to call MS Word 2000 (or any other MS Office program) a fragmented product - it is available in many localized versions, each with their own, localized programming language. Files are almost compatible, but the looks are different, language is different etc. Linux will standardize OS and application interfaces at a time where focus is no more on operating systems and APIs, but on services and information. There is no money in selling office suites and GUIs in the future - the money is in content and being the company that has the consumer contractual relations. Dybdahl.