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Microsoft Goes Head-to-Head With IBM
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Microsoft's latest announcements that it is going after large-business computing, a realm that IBM currently has a stronghold on." From the article: "In both cases, the company has fashioned 'enterprise' versions of the products with additional security and collaboration-enabling features for sale to large businesses. Microsoft has spent $20 billion over the past three years on these upgrades, and Ballmer says it will spend $500 million over the next year marketing them to corporations. 'We're unlocking the next wave of growth for Microsoft,' Ballmer predicted during a press conference after his speech." We've previously discussed Microsoft's plans for IBM.
This won't work until Microsoft has completely changed Windows to be Unix-like. They are working on it. With each release, they learn their lessons and add backwards implementations of Unix innovations. As long as they continue down that path, they might someday be able to take over the big iron market. But they're not quite there yet.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I thought they tried this a few years ago with Unisys. Long story short, it was supposed to be a 32-processor version of Windows on Unisys iron. AFAIK it went nowhere. (This was about the time that Unisys was pitching connecting web servers running on mainframes to the Internet.)