Another issue with analyzing Notes/Domino, is that it's suitability highly depends on the type of applications you are using, and if you are planning to run the Notes client or not.
With the Notes client, it's a proprietary, but pretty effective system for e-mail, calendaring, and the ambiguous "groupware" type applications (generally discussion, tracking, or approval applications that don't require much relational data.) Development is proprietary, but much more rapid and lower cost than your typical VB/Delphi client-server apps. (Most Notes shops are far closer to 'paperless' than places where the only back ends are relational DBs.) The server is certainly stable, and scales better than MS Exchange, although not as well as commodity IMAP and HTTP servers.
As a pure web server, I have mixed feelings about Domino. It does dynamic server-side HTML, but the development environment is not well suited for that at all. Every HTML document must be dynamically converted from Notes format, so it's slow. It includes web mail and discussion applications, but they are certainly not near the best you can get in that department. CGI-like applications with Domino agents run slowly and high overhead.
As a web server, the only thing that Domino seems to give you is the built-in document storage engine (which involves no programming overhead.) For some applications, that might be worth it, but for many others (like Slashdot, for example), a simple relational database can do the job just fine, and the programming overhead for storage is mitigated or justified by the use of standard web development tools.
In short, Domino works great if your organization is willing to commit to using it for your smaller applications, and you're willing to use the Notes client. Otherwise, I'd look around more.
If you're losing data in Notes you either have developers or administrators that don't know what they're doing. Domino might be slow, but it doesn't 'lose' data.
The huge caveat with Domino on Linux is the 2 GB file size limit on 32-bit ext2.
This shouldn't affect 90% of the Notes/Domino applications out there, but the product can certainly support larger databases. This might pose a problem if you are planning to migrate an existing Domino site from NT or OS/2 to Linux.
Did you ever notice how MSNBC never reports anything about General Electric, who owns the other 50% of the network?
What's the real conspiracy, overzelous reporting of one of the largest software corporations, or absent reporting of a much bigger and more powerful corporation than Microsoft?
It's not just brand recognition. Intel has marketing arrangements with major computer companies that virtually guarantees them a market for these CPUs on corporate desktops and low end servers. And corporations will pay well to get the "fastest" chip (read highest Mhz number).
AMD, unfortuately, can only really sell into the "home market" channel from the major manufactures. That and the "clone" and hobbiest market needs to keep them afloat until they can get into the business market.
Good point. Sun's probably likely to stick with Sparc hardware for now, but *if* Intel manages to scale IA-64 way beyond Sparc, I wouldn't think that Sun would have any problem switching over.
First of all Solaris x86, is horrible when compared to Solaris/Sparc
I'm at a loss to explain why the general/. opinion is that Solaris/x86 sucks so hard. Certainly Sparc hardware is nicer than Intel hardware, but Intel hardware is good enough for Linux for most of you.
Certainly Solaris/x86's hardware support is much thinner than Linux's, and the distribution is pretty thin compared to Linux, but from what I've seen, Solaris on Intel is a very solid operating system once you have it up and running.
Furthermore, in the PC Week "NOS Shootout" a few months ago (which got everyone here up-in-arms), Solaris/Intel was faster and scaled better than either NT or Linux.
Perhaps if Sun wrote a few more device drivers, and shipped Gnome, KDE, the GNU toolset, XFree, and so on, Linux folks would have a little more respect for the OS....
It would be a strange world where Sun offers support for Windows 2000 on it's hardware! Especially since Sun touts it's position as the only major computer company without some deal with Microsoft.
What's more likely is that Sun is going to make damn sure that Solaris runs better on Sun IA-64 stuff than on your commodity Dell or Compaq. Some of this will be due to just plain better hardware from Sun, but I'll bet that Solaris will have a few hooks in it that will disimprove performance when running on a non-Sun box.
No company now would commit to a closed hardware strategy.
Companies continue to commit to close hardware strategies every day. Look no further than your nearest IBM shop -- Do you know that AS/400s are selling like hot cakes? In that context, Sun hardware looks pretty open, because you could add commodity memory and disk if you weren't worried about the support.
Even PC Hardware has lock-in. There's a reason our server room is completely filled with Compaq Proliants (it's the proprietary hotswap disk subsystem), and not three from each company. "Commodity" hardware is really only well suited for commodity tasks - companies will happily pay through the nose for proprietary stuff if it gets the job done better.
The theory behind a $300 computer is that it's going to be more feasible to buy another $300 computer thats twice as fast in 18 months than it is to pay a $50/hour technican to upgrade the existing thing. (Maybe you wanted to play quake on that computer, but from a business's standpoint, a $300 "closed" computer should be just fine for most tasks.)
So is this a "closed" hardware strategy? Not really in the classic IBM Mainframe sense. Any investment that you can throw into the trash and forget about without a second thought seems pretty 'open' to me.
August 31, 1999 - Microsoft and Intel Announce 64-bit Windows Running on Merced Processor Intel and Microsoft hit key milestone for delivery of 64-bit hardware and software next year Link
I'm not astroturfing, but Microsoft has been promising a 64-bit version of NT for Alpha Real-Soon-Now for years. It's just wishful thinking that they won't get it done eventually.
I wonder what effect CPU speed has on TCO and total marginal benefit of ownership...
For most PC users - very little, I would imagine. PC's have had enough juice to run office-type applications for years. (I remember how painful spell checking was on my Mac SE, and now it's real time.) To some extent, CPU can help allievate bandwidth problems for applications like video conferencing and whatever Intel has on their Pentium III website, but those are pretty marginal benefits.
On the other hand, CPU power has allowed corporations to deploy server applications which query and search massive amounts of data. Definate benefit there, but that CPU is hardly needed on the client side.
Certain Lotus 1-2-3 users hit the 640K barrier pretty hard early on. (A early expanded memory spec was called "LIM", for Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft. Note that IBM was MIA.)
Although, to Gates' credit, you have to remember he was shilling a product that ran on hardware limited to 640K. Slashdot folks like to forget that Gates functions more of a marketeer and promoter than the all knowing leader of all computing.
Anyways, seeing ye olde Bill-and-640K story about once a week on Slashdot, I have to snicker - after all, 2 GB ought to be a the largest file anyone would need on a 32-bit system!
Didn't Microsoft actually take an ownership interest in AT+T? I'm sure that it had more to do with just CE deployment. Think about it:
+ WebTV/MSN access on AT+T cable systems, not AOL. + MSN DSL and wireless services, where AT+T provides them. + Everybody gets MS-NBC. + AT+T Internet service is less competitive with MSN. + Microsoft can push content standards ('Windows Media' instead of Real, and so on.)
Scary? Yes, but hardly unique in the conglomorated marketplace of cable tv. At least the cable companies are smart enough to ensure that there are many viable vendors of set top operating systems (unlike the computer industry).
Great, Except Netscape resizes slowly even on Windows.
From the look of it, resizing or changing the font in Netscape causes the browser to go back out to the network and reload the page. Why it does this instead of reloading from cache is beyond me.
So, it's such an inevitablity that Microsoft will be porting to Linux that we're already worrying about what widget set they will use?
As far as I know, the only Microsoft product available on Unix is Internet Explorer, and they use Mainsoft as a kind-of-reverse WINE to translate Win32 to Unix calls. So, IE/Linux would seem to be a possibility, especially considering that Microsoft is positioning IE as a cross-platform product, and they make no money off of it.
Are you going to see a port of MS Office or anything else any time soon? Doubtful -- the Linux 'community' is hardly asking for it, and neither are the IT managers that sign Microsoft contracts. (And I'd think that SQL or Exchange would be the remotest of possibilities just for marketing reasons.)
Saying that a company called "Microsoft" was merely along for the ride in the Microcomputer Software business is a little silly isn't it?
I'll agree that IBM "legitimized" the personal computer as a business tool. But, if they didn't, someone else probably would have (all the pieces already existed), and MS probably would have had their fingers in the deal as well. They knew from the start that there's more money in the blades than the razors, and that personal computing was going to be a big market.
IBM is the reason we have multivendor hardware sources.
Actually, if you look at business microcomputer market before the IBM PC entered in, it already had multi-vendor hardware sources, but were software compatible with the CP/M OS. However, despite rough software compatiblity, every computer company had there own disk, video and I/O standards, which meant that there had to be a 'port' for each machine type.
The IBM PC simply substituted the common 8080 with an 8086; the S-100 bus for ISA; and CP/M for a clone, MS-DOS. Other than that, pretty much the same as a standard CP/M machine. What IBM did give the PC world was a base standard for disk format and video output, which made selling consumer software and add-on hardware much easier.
but it was not Microsoft that got the PC revolution started- it was IBM.
BZZZT. Microsoft got in on the ground floor of the "PC Revolution". They wrote the standard BASIC software that was either in the firmware or shipped with virtually every personal computer sold before IBM introduce theirs in 1981. (Apple, Atari, Commodore, TRS-80, etc.). Microsoft has had it's cut of every PC sold since the very beginning in the mid 70s
BTW, Microsoft and Intel understood what was going on and in fact conspired to created the clone market. They were hardly accidental beneficiaries of the mighty and wise IBM. Proof - Microsoft got paid nearly nothing by IBM for PC/MS DOS 1.0. But they did get ownership of the code and the right to sell the OS to other computer manufacturers. They would have never made this deal if they didn't think that cloning would have been a good business in the future. (See Triumph of the Nerds for details.)
The story I heard is that MS hired away the chief icon designer from Apple for Windows 3.0. The result was the round, pastel icons that signified Windows 3, and are still in modern Windows versions (Calculator, Media Player, Domain Users).
The 'window dressing' in Windows 3 is pretty clearly influenced by OS/2 and Motif.
Slashdot Mirror
Another issue with analyzing Notes/Domino, is that it's suitability highly depends on the type of applications you are using, and if you are planning to run the Notes client or not.
With the Notes client, it's a proprietary, but pretty effective system for e-mail, calendaring, and the ambiguous "groupware" type applications (generally discussion, tracking, or approval applications that don't require much relational data.) Development is proprietary, but much more rapid and lower cost than your typical VB/Delphi client-server apps. (Most Notes shops are far closer to 'paperless' than places where the only back ends are relational DBs.) The server is certainly stable, and scales better than MS Exchange, although not as well as commodity IMAP and HTTP servers.
As a pure web server, I have mixed feelings about Domino. It does dynamic server-side HTML, but the development environment is not well suited for that at all. Every HTML document must be dynamically converted from Notes format, so it's slow. It includes web mail and discussion applications, but they are certainly not near the best you can get in that department. CGI-like applications with Domino agents run slowly and high overhead.
As a web server, the only thing that Domino seems to give you is the built-in document storage engine (which involves no programming overhead.) For some applications, that might be worth it, but for many others (like Slashdot, for example), a simple relational database can do the job just fine, and the programming overhead for storage is mitigated or justified by the use of standard web development tools.
In short, Domino works great if your organization is willing to commit to using it for your smaller applications, and you're willing to use the Notes client. Otherwise, I'd look around more.
If you're losing data in Notes you either have developers or administrators that don't know what they're doing. Domino might be slow, but it doesn't 'lose' data.
The huge caveat with Domino on Linux is the 2 GB file size limit on 32-bit ext2.
This shouldn't affect 90% of the Notes/Domino applications out there, but the product can certainly support larger databases. This might pose a problem if you are planning to migrate an existing Domino site from NT or OS/2 to Linux.
Did you ever notice how MSNBC never reports anything about General Electric, who owns the other 50% of the network?
What's the real conspiracy, overzelous reporting of one of the largest software corporations, or absent reporting of a much bigger and more powerful corporation than Microsoft?
It's not just brand recognition. Intel has marketing arrangements with major computer companies that virtually guarantees them a market for these CPUs on corporate desktops and low end servers. And corporations will pay well to get the "fastest" chip (read highest Mhz number).
AMD, unfortuately, can only really sell into the "home market" channel from the major manufactures. That and the "clone" and hobbiest market needs to keep them afloat until they can get into the business market.
Good point. Sun's probably likely to stick with Sparc hardware for now, but *if* Intel manages to scale IA-64 way beyond Sparc, I wouldn't think that Sun would have any problem switching over.
I know that you can get GNU binaries easily for Solaris, however not getting them out-of-the-box is a big complaint from Linux users.
First of all Solaris x86, is horrible when compared to Solaris/Sparc
/. opinion is that Solaris/x86 sucks so hard. Certainly Sparc hardware is nicer than Intel hardware, but Intel hardware is good enough for Linux for most of you.
I'm at a loss to explain why the general
Certainly Solaris/x86's hardware support is much thinner than Linux's, and the distribution is pretty thin compared to Linux, but from what I've seen, Solaris on Intel is a very solid operating system once you have it up and running.
Furthermore, in the PC Week "NOS Shootout" a few months ago (which got everyone here up-in-arms), Solaris/Intel was faster and scaled better than either NT or Linux.
Perhaps if Sun wrote a few more device drivers, and shipped Gnome, KDE, the GNU toolset, XFree, and so on, Linux folks would have a little more respect for the OS....
It would be a strange world where Sun offers support for Windows 2000 on it's hardware! Especially since Sun touts it's position as the only major computer company without some deal with Microsoft.
What's more likely is that Sun is going to make damn sure that Solaris runs better on Sun IA-64 stuff than on your commodity Dell or Compaq. Some of this will be due to just plain better hardware from Sun, but I'll bet that Solaris will have a few hooks in it that will disimprove performance when running on a non-Sun box.
I think your suggestion makes my point about commodity hardware in PC space.
External highly available RAID box
= even more proprietary than Compaq
= Better because it gets the job done better
No company now would commit to a closed hardware strategy.
Companies continue to commit to close hardware strategies every day. Look no further than your nearest IBM shop -- Do you know that AS/400s are selling like hot cakes? In that context, Sun hardware looks pretty open, because you could add commodity memory and disk if you weren't worried about the support.
Even PC Hardware has lock-in. There's a reason our server room is completely filled with Compaq Proliants (it's the proprietary hotswap disk subsystem), and not three from each company. "Commodity" hardware is really only well suited for commodity tasks - companies will happily pay through the nose for proprietary stuff if it gets the job done better.
The theory behind a $300 computer is that it's going to be more feasible to buy another $300 computer thats twice as fast in 18 months than it is to pay a $50/hour technican to upgrade the existing thing. (Maybe you wanted to play quake on that computer, but from a business's standpoint, a $300 "closed" computer should be just fine for most tasks.)
So is this a "closed" hardware strategy? Not really in the classic IBM Mainframe sense. Any investment that you can throw into the trash and forget about without a second thought seems pretty 'open' to me.
We'll see. My theory is that it will ship all 64-bit, but it will be about as popular on NT-on-Alpha.
August 31, 1999 - Microsoft and Intel Announce 64-bit Windows Running on Merced Processor
Intel and Microsoft hit key milestone for delivery of 64-bit hardware and software next year Link
I'm not astroturfing, but Microsoft has been promising a 64-bit version of NT for Alpha Real-Soon-Now for years. It's just wishful thinking that they won't get it done eventually.
And is a 700 Mhz Pentium twice as efficent as a 350 Mhz Pentium?
(I don't know, but I kind-of-doubt-it.)
I wonder what effect CPU speed has on TCO and total marginal benefit of ownership...
For most PC users - very little, I would imagine. PC's have had enough juice to run office-type applications for years. (I remember how painful spell checking was on my Mac SE, and now it's real time.) To some extent, CPU can help allievate bandwidth problems for applications like video conferencing and whatever Intel has on their Pentium III website, but those are pretty marginal benefits.
On the other hand, CPU power has allowed corporations to deploy server applications which query and search massive amounts of data. Definate benefit there, but that CPU is hardly needed on the client side.
Certain Lotus 1-2-3 users hit the 640K barrier pretty hard early on. (A early expanded memory spec was called "LIM", for Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft. Note that IBM was MIA.)
Although, to Gates' credit, you have to remember he was shilling a product that ran on hardware limited to 640K. Slashdot folks like to forget that Gates functions more of a marketeer and promoter than the all knowing leader of all computing.
Anyways, seeing ye olde Bill-and-640K story about once a week on Slashdot, I have to snicker - after all, 2 GB ought to be a the largest file anyone would need on a 32-bit system!
My understanding is that Wince is based on a cut down version of the NT kernel. It's certainly not based on DOS.
Didn't Microsoft actually take an ownership interest in AT+T? I'm sure that it had more to do with just CE deployment. Think about it:
+ WebTV/MSN access on AT+T cable systems, not AOL.
+ MSN DSL and wireless services, where AT+T provides them.
+ Everybody gets MS-NBC.
+ AT+T Internet service is less competitive with MSN.
+ Microsoft can push content standards ('Windows Media' instead of Real, and so on.)
Scary? Yes, but hardly unique in the conglomorated marketplace of cable tv. At least the cable companies are smart enough to ensure that there are many viable vendors of set top operating systems (unlike the computer industry).
Great, Except Netscape resizes slowly even on Windows.
From the look of it, resizing or changing the font in Netscape causes the browser to go back out to the network and reload the page. Why it does this instead of reloading from cache is beyond me.
So, it's such an inevitablity that Microsoft will be porting to Linux that we're already worrying about what widget set they will use?
As far as I know, the only Microsoft product available on Unix is Internet Explorer, and they use Mainsoft as a kind-of-reverse WINE to translate Win32 to Unix calls. So, IE/Linux would seem to be a possibility, especially considering that Microsoft is positioning IE as a cross-platform product, and they make no money off of it.
Are you going to see a port of MS Office or anything else any time soon? Doubtful -- the Linux 'community' is hardly asking for it, and neither are the IT managers that sign Microsoft contracts. (And I'd think that SQL or Exchange would be the remotest of possibilities just for marketing reasons.)
Saying that a company called "Microsoft" was merely along for the ride in the Microcomputer Software business is a little silly isn't it?
I'll agree that IBM "legitimized" the personal computer as a business tool. But, if they didn't, someone else probably would have (all the pieces already existed), and MS probably would have had their fingers in the deal as well. They knew from the start that there's more money in the blades than the razors, and that personal computing was going to be a big market.
IBM is the reason we have multivendor hardware sources.
Actually, if you look at business microcomputer market before the IBM PC entered in, it already had multi-vendor hardware sources, but were software compatible with the CP/M OS. However, despite rough software compatiblity, every computer company had there own disk, video and I/O standards, which meant that there had to be a 'port' for each machine type.
The IBM PC simply substituted the common 8080 with an 8086; the S-100 bus for ISA; and CP/M for a clone, MS-DOS. Other than that, pretty much the same as a standard CP/M machine. What IBM did give the PC world was a base standard for disk format and video output, which made selling consumer software and add-on hardware much easier.
but it was not Microsoft that got the PC revolution started- it was IBM.
BZZZT. Microsoft got in on the ground floor of the "PC Revolution". They wrote the standard BASIC software that was either in the firmware or shipped with virtually every personal computer sold before IBM introduce theirs in 1981. (Apple, Atari, Commodore, TRS-80, etc.). Microsoft has had it's cut of every PC sold since the very beginning in the mid 70s
BTW, Microsoft and Intel understood what was going on and in fact conspired to created the clone market. They were hardly accidental beneficiaries of the mighty and wise IBM. Proof - Microsoft got paid nearly nothing by IBM for PC/MS DOS 1.0. But they did get ownership of the code and the right to sell the OS to other computer manufacturers. They would have never made this deal if they didn't think that cloning would have been a good business in the future. (See Triumph of the Nerds for details.)
The story I heard is that MS hired away the chief icon designer from Apple for Windows 3.0. The result was the round, pastel icons that signified Windows 3, and are still in modern Windows versions (Calculator, Media Player, Domain Users).
The 'window dressing' in Windows 3 is pretty clearly influenced by OS/2 and Motif.