Merill Lynch on Y2K: good for Free Software

Nouvelles Neuves Linux quotes Merill Lynch as stating: "When all the smoke around the year 2000 has finally cleared away, the survey suggests there will be a shift away from the Windows-based client server environment. Within a 3-year time scale, the majority of users are expected to have moved to a network computing platform, with Java applications taking a more dominant role. The survey also notes that Linux is becoming an important industry trend. What is missing is an industry leader pushing open software towards the mainstream, but Merrill Lynch expects that by mid-year IBM Corp may slip into this role, offering Linux service and support. This slide towards open source has been backed up by Sun Microsystems making Java in part open source. According to the survey, the outcome of these changes could, in time, have as drastic an effect on software pricing as the advent of microprocessor did on hardware pricing." Seperately, on last Friday's Wall Street News with Louis Rukeyser, the small caps investor said she was not investing in Software Companies because most companies would want to stay with software they knew rather than installing new products until 2000.