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To: jim kelley who wrote (73740)	10/22/1998 10:24:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Jim - good points. The OS battle is won by applications, not OS capability per se. NT is growing application support faster than any UNIX variant, and simplifying the process of cross-platform development is a major focus at MSFT over the next 18 months. Solaris in particular has made it increasingly difficult to develop effective cross-platform apps. Just last month they finally saw the handwriting on the wall and released the kind of minimal support that Solaris users had been looking for since 1996 when DEC and HP moved in that direction. ISV's develop for the volume platform - that's where the money is. If MSFT is successful in creating an environment where a developer can write for both a UNIX variant and NT, then that is the environment the ISVs will write to. This was the supposed premise of JAVA - 'write once, run anywhere' except that what SUN really meant was 'runs best on UNIX'. SUN lost that war when they failed to drive a truly open architecture. SUN's position on JAVA and their failure to build a meaningful industry coalition is what drove me to get out of SUNW in 1997. Market forces will increasingly marginalize the UNIX environment. The installed base is large and the trend will take a while to become obvious to the layman but this has been a well-known trend in the industry for several years now. Late 2000 and 2001 will be the pivotal period. Just like the MVS mainframe environment, UNIX will be around for a long time, because of the large base of legacy applications and the long replacement cycles of the current customer base. But the critical new applications will be increasingly written to cross-platform environments which favor NT.