🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DCL9rv.8yA@world.std.com>, jim frost <jimf@world.std.com> wrote:

>Whether or not NT has been selling well depends on what you think its
>intended market to be.  Certainly it's fallen flat as a mass-market
>desktop system, but in my opinion it was never intended to be such.
>The feature set is all wrong.  If you consider it to be a UNIX
>workstation competitor, as I do, it's been doing quite well: last year
>it had more than double the sales rate of the most popular UNIX
>variant!  Even if its sales rate remains flat from 1994 it will match
>the installed base of the second largest UNIX variant this year.  Best
>available information indicates that 1995 sales will be significantly
>better than 1994, though, so most likely NT's installed base will
>greatly exceed that of *any* individual UNIX variant by the end of
>this year.

Microsoft cheerleading aside, let's look at this logically:

The market for nt machines differs in several ways from the unix
market. nt machines are used mainly by former windows users and
suspender-snapping, technically feeble management types who want 
to upgrade their capabilities without having to learn unix, 
tcp/ip and internet services administration issues.

nt is great as "windoze on steroids", or a "crash-proof windoze"
if you will. The OS is fairly solid under the hood, and offers the 
familiar interface which the general PeeCee user finds comforting.

The unix market is those who need heavy-duty machines with industrial 
strength OS, and full-on connectivity with tcp/ip internet services.

Universities and highly technical corporations tend to be typical unix 
strongholds. Take my work environment, for instance. If you were to remove
the Suns, SGIs and linux machines which populate our subnets, replacing
them with nt PeeCees, we would be absolutely crippled, and effectively
out of business. NIS, dns, nfs, pcnfs, amd, sendmail, xdm and dozens of 
absolutely critical network services would be gone.

windows nt has it's place, and we have nt machines here; but to think
that nt could even begin to replace the unix machines will result only
in a knee-slapping, brings-tears-to-your-eyes fit of laughter...

--
 Joe Sloan     jjs@engr.ucr.edu   http://dostoevsky.ucr.edu
     Win95? No, none for me, thanks - I'm already running Linux...
 Microsoft is not the answer - Microsoft is the question; the answer is NO!