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

To: stak who wrote (11274)	10/11/1998 2:36:00 AM
From: mozek	Respond to of 74651

If you were a CIO would you be satisfied with an "I believe it will be reliable" answer. or would it have to be "I bet my job and reputation on this product?? I'm actually not in the NT 5.0 core product group, so when I say "I believe it will be reliable", I'm saying exactly that. My making a stronger statement won't change the outcome, and I'm not trying to convince anyone. I'm just stating my belief. As they say, "the proof's in the pudding" :-) I guess I mean will NT5.0 be run with its 32 bit code on the Merced as is? 64 bit NT will be a fully 64 bit operating system. I don't know how much more I can say than that. What do you mean by usability? Linux guys seem to have no problems using Linux, in fact they crow about what they can do with it. I've also heard great things about Linux. There are some in my group who use Linux in order to get a feel for other systems. The general consensus is that it may be great for the high-end, but installation and configuration is no picnic. The typical argument from Unix vendors is that this doesn't matter for the high-end. My belief is that as NT closes the gap in scalability and reliability, it'll only make sense to invest less in deployment and configuration of these systems, not to mention the value in a consistent OS across the enterprise. The usual grain of salt thing... That's why I mentioned my employer :-) Thanks, Mike

To: stak who wrote (11274)	10/11/1998 9:21:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

Stak - If you were a CIO would you be satisfied with an "I believe it will be reliable" answer. or would it have to be "I bet my job and reputation on this product?? Unfortunately, none is without sin in this regard, except for the proprietary players (Tandem, DEC VMS, IBM MVS, a very few lesser known others). I did a lot of work consulting on Wall St. where many trading applications were Sybase running on Sun. Both Sybase and Sun produced systems and upgrades which simply did not work in several key areas. I could mention at least 1 CIO who DID lose his job because of a major FUBAR incident which was eventually traced to an arcane flaw in Solaris. But the same is certainly true of HP-UX and even DEC Unix, which is probably the most reliable of the 'big' unix variants. NT is not even in that game, and will not be for several more years. The point is that there are systems, like the New York stock exchange (and also the 26 other largest stock exchanges) that need the kind of reliability that Tandem's non-stop gives (and are willing to pay the price, which is not cheap). There are applications like trading desk stuff where the high performance and flexible multitasking of Solaris, combined with great Sun hardware, works just fine, and the occasional barf is manageable. There are lots of background file and print systems running NT, and over the last few years, NT has begun to make inroads into the applications server space as well. As long as the OS has consistent behavior, and the CIO knows what it can and can not do, then he or she can select the best product for the job. In today's world, by units, it is about 50-50 Unix and NT for 'enterprise class' applications, but clearly Unix is at the upper end and NT at the lower end. So if the CIO is saying "I believe it will be reliable" or "I bet my job and reputation on this product" he had better have sufficient knowledge of what the product can do, whether it's Unix or NT, if he wants to keep his job.