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Strategies & Market Trends : Heinz Blasnik- Views You Can Use -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GraceZ who wrote (3251)	7/25/2003 3:29:59 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4907

For a while there in the 90's I was employed by a large Unix systems vendor; Microsoft NT was making big strides; the time was ripe for change at the LAN level due to strategic missteps by Novell. Microsoft stole a lot of mind share from IT shops in part because it was easier to bring IT staff up to speed on a Windows platform (NT) than Unix. That probably remains true today, although to do the tough stuff, the skills required are about similar. Over time we started to see more database servers and application servers going to NT. That no doubt still happens to this day, but increasingly Unix is there in many organizations plans. The long promised death of Unix may be more a Death of Sun and HP versions of Unix. When NT first came out it was not frequently used for BIG applications. My experience with using Microsoft technologies in large complex applications is that it requries at least the same level of experience in infrastructure support and development staff as any Unix based applications. So for the big stuff, cost of people may no longer be a differentiating factor. Cost of license - for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD etc - is zero for many. Suddenly some scales start to tip. Common acceptance is the remaining hurdle and I do believe that acceptance of a non Microsoft agenda - at the enterprise application infrastructure level - is increasing.