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Re: Perception is Barrier to Open Source Market Acceptance

After takin' a swig o' grog, Rex Ballard belched out this bit o' wisdom:

> Which is what makes Linux so extraordinary.  OSS doesn't make any
> promises about the future.  There is what is there today.  But what is
> there today is driving Microsoft to make promises it hasn't been able
> to keep.  In 1992, Microsoft promised a "Better Unix than Unix" making
> reference to SunOS 4.0 which featured X11 Windows, true preemptive
> multitasking ,fully collaborative computing, clustering of desktop
> machines into a "network is the mainframe" supercomputer, security that
> exceeded the needs of most banks, insurance companies, and stock
> brokers, performance and reliability that exceeded the needs of
> companies like Dow Jones (a failure in the DJ news feed in 1987 caused
> a stock market crash almost as bad as the one in 1929), utility
> companies (even controlling nuclear reactors) and even the stock market
> trading systems (many of the NYSE trading systems were Suns in 1992).

That one was a real laugher.  A Billy-box taking over for a Sun box!

Luckily, Microsoft was able to snowjob a lot of people into believing it
while they struggled to make it happen.

The bargain-basement "addict 'em" and "lock 'em in" prices helped, too.

> To this day, nearly 14 years later, Windows XP has still failed to come
> anywhere near fulfilling that promise.  They have YET to deliver a
> system that provides the performance, reliability, security, stability,
> flexibility, and performance of even SunOS, let alone Solaris 10, AIX
> 5.3, or SUSE Enterprise Linux Desktop 10.

Consumers generally like it, though, even if it misbehaves now and then.

I'd be happy enough if XP supported multiple VNC sessions.

-- 
   Windows XP. The operating system with a load in its pants.

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