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To: ToySoldier who wrote (3855)	9/17/1998 4:09:00 PM
From: David Harker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 8218

ToySoldier, glad to hear you agree. >When I said IBM being in the game, you were thinking of the wrong >game. IBM is not in the distributed computing infrastructure game. >To clarify that: IBM will not have any control of the platforms >that run the massive majority of desktop and intel based NOS/SOS. >Warp is a lost cause in the industry now. If you are specifically saying "MSFT has won" in the desktop/intel market, you are totally correct. All SanFran developers use NT, and we've NEVER even tried to run it on OS/2 Warp. The goal of SanFran, and other projects like it, is to make the choice of operating system a non-issue. Except for "Glue code" that talks to various data-base packages that San Fran supports (Oracle, db2, etc) which, due to the db's lack of openness to Java, must be in C++, all our code is all Java and runs w/ no mods on OS/400, AIX, Solaris, NT, etc. Various companies and government organizations around the world have compared MSFT's com/dcom to San Fran, and picked San Fran. That DOES put us in the "Distributed Computing" infrastructure game, to me anyway... And while MSFT has placed NT on lots of PC's, companies using San Fran have no dependencies on NT (while users of COM/DCOM have complete dependence on MSFT). Those SanFran users can leave NT behind when they upgrade servers, going to a Sun box running Solaris, or an AS/400 running OS/400, etc. MSFT has the pc client market locked up (for the operating system), but there is a LOT of money in the servers, the overall corporate computing infrastructure, and the SanFran project hopes to make MSFT a much smaller player in that market. We also want to make it really easy for other software companies (many of whom make products for both the MSFT and IBM OS's) to sell products that can run ANYWHERE - that hurts MSFT, so we give away SanFran, collecting royalties on the end-products built on top of it (though each contract is different, that's the model). Give it away, make it the standard, then worry about the money.