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

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (20064)	4/8/1999 5:26:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

cheryl... I'm not quite sure what John was trying to point out here, but it brings up an interesting point. As a software applications developer as far as I'm concerned Linux is yet another unix variant I have to port my application to. The unix vendors better get a handle on this and standardize this time. When I worked at Oracle in the early 90s we had almost as many developers porting to all the unix variants as we did working on some parts of the kernel - can you imagine Sun,HPUX,irix,IBM had 2 unix's, etc etc and the next thing you know its 30+ different ports - this is unaccepable and thats why the minute NT became a viable alternative the software companies jumped on board. The unix management including McNealy knew this was going to be a problem and yet never solved it 8 years ago. If Linux is the winner, so be it, commoditize the platform and differentiate yourselves on hardware... of course its tempting not to do that and to tweak the OS in some way to gain a competitive adv... the software companies won't fall for that this time I'm afraid.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (20064)	4/8/1999 5:43:00 PM
From: DownSouth	Respond to of 74651

I see Linux making a dent in UNIX platforms just as much or even more so than NT. Hello???? John, Linux itself is a Unix platform. What, exactly, are you trying to say? cheryl, quit being a techno snob. This is not a programmers' workshop. You know what John meant.

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (20064)	4/8/1999 6:58:00 PM
From: John F. Dowd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74651

I refer to all the other variants of the kernel that are incorporated into various server offerings. It is just another variant. Being free it is hard to see how it will fund its future improvement and how will it penetrate the mass of applications already written for Windows. What is to prevent MSFT from offering a blackk hat version of this free code and porting alltheir stuff to it faster than anyone else. I have found some good freeware in my cpu life but I never use it after a few months. The test of a product is someone willing to pay for it. I venture to say that MSFT could in fact charge for the new IE 5.0 and get away with it- it is that good. The test of enterprise is profit! Thanks for asking me to refine my earlier posit. JFD

To: cheryl williamson who wrote (20064)	4/8/1999 7:44:00 PM
From: John F. Dowd	Respond to of 74651

cheryl: This says it as well as anything Linux is another one of these- Compaq joins UNIX unification effort led by IBM HOUSTON, April 7 (Reuters) - Compaq Computer Corp. on Wednesday joined an industry alliance seeking to unify the fractured market for UNIX, a software operating system used to control powerful business computers. Compaq said it joined the Monterey alliance led by Santa Cruz Operation Inc. and IBM . The group is co-developing a version of UNIX that brings together many of the rival flavors of the business computer software system. Compaq said it will support the group's efforts to forge a unified version of UNIX designed to operate on computers running Intel Corp's forthcoming generation of high-volume 64-bit microprocessors. UNIX is a powerful computer operating system used to run industrial strength computer operations like phone networks, stock markets and retail inventory tracking systems. But since its development 30 years ago, UNIX has fragmented into a series of niche markets as each computer maker designed its own version of the software, leaving a hodgepodge market of UNIX computers that can not easily work together. John