It gives us a rough minimum number of machines with Linux on them.
It does no such thing. If anything, retail sales of Linux are going to be to newbies and the MCSE gearhead faction that are just looking to play around with some new toy. The systems they are going on are probably duel boot workstations, and the odds are that they are going to be booted into Windows a large percentage of the time.
On the other hand, the Linux saavy crowd who run the OS full time or nearly full time are more likely to download it or buy it at cheapbytes. Real servers at work usually have good Internet connectivity and admins that don't need installation handholding.
Furthermore, because (unlike MS) Linux vendors don't have special "Upgrade" versions, it's impossible to know if a given sale/download of Linux is going onto a new machine or a machine that already has Linux on it. Since most Linux vendors have a pretty aggro upgrade schedule this throws the numbers off -- all those sales/downloads can't be new Linux installs.
What would really be interesting would be to get Dell or IBM's numbers on Linux preinstalls. Given IBM's recent behavior, I suspect those numbers look very good for Linux.
Not cynical at all, because it happened. Microsoft has something called VML. I think they pulled a Netscape-style submit-it-to-the-W3C-after-we've-already-shipped-i t type thing.
Multi-monitors are very useful for graphics or video work. It's possible he invested in his setup for reasons other than playing flight sims.
(I used to pick up old fixed frequency Apple monitors and obsolete NuBus video cards for cheap or free and hook them up to my six-slot IIfx. People are usually impressed when they see a wall of monitors on your desk, so much so they don't notice that your computer is a slow piece of junk!)
I'm not even sure there ever was a product called MS-DOS 2.0.
There was "IBM PC DOS by Microsoft", "Compaq DOS by Microsoft", "Acer DOS by Microsoft", and so on. If "MS-DOS" ever shipped with that written on the box before version 4, I never saw it.
The only part of the proposed MS-OS that seems to have anything to do with.NET is the IIS web server (and even that might be 'middleware'). If so, MS-Apps just bundles Apache with an ASP+ module (hey, it's 'winning' anyway.)
All of the stuff about not being COM-dependant seems to be a radical turn away from Microsoft's usual operating system integration tactics. From Windows Everywhere to Windows Nowhere, it seems.
This defeats the breakup to some extent by loading the MS-Apps side. However, at the least, they can't force PC OEMs to pre-install the.NET infrastructure. (The OS licencing issues being the core of the anti-trust case.) This increases the percieved cost of.NET stuff by quite a bit, because it's no longer "for free".
I just want to say that I understand your problem and that it seems that Microsoft's policies are designed to particularly screw businesses of your size. And I'd guess that your situation is actually pretty common.
If you are small, buy everything retail, and stay legal, you have no problems with Microsoft. If you are large, you can get bare systems, pay Microsoft for a fancy support agreement, you have no problem. However, if you are big enough to site licence, but too small to have any clout with MS or the vendor, too bad.
What can you do? I dunno -- Find a new hardware vendor, a small clone shop perhaps? Buy a year's worth of computers at one time from your vendor to get them bare? Threaten MS that you won't install/licence BackOffice apps unless they let up on you? Site licence W2000, and buy machiens with 98 to minimize the loss? Screw it and go illegal? It's a tough problem.
Actually, I wish folks like you would just recommend Flash or PDF to clients that want 'printed output'-like pages. Then we can get the HTML back nice and simple, and it will be easier for me to add dynamic content to pages that aren't junked up with nested tables and spacer gifs.
Of course, this could backfire, and next thing you know I'd be writing a database backend to a Flash application.
The whole ActiveDirectory thing is enormously complex and there's very few people with real world experience with it. (And most of them are in Microsoft Consulting!)
People even managed to fuck up the old NT domain thing, which shipped for 13 years and had lots of people that understood how to do it right.
So, the fact that your company is doing any sort of W2K conversion effort shows that you are far, far ahead of the average American business.
Compaqs have been a pain in the ass for years. They have a horrible reputation for changing video, sound, and network chips in the middle of a product's model life. This makes them almost impossible to support with a disk image. Top that off with the fact that they like to pretend they still make "Compaq" Sound and Ethernet controllers, when in fact it's the same clone junk you find elsewhere.
On the other hand, you should have been able find drivers on their website.
5000 Employees = ~1700 new computers per year = You are a large enough customer that any vendor will ship you PCs in any configuration you like, including a custom image or even bare.
Some companies might be paying twice. The ones with half a brain aren't.
Of course, the typical "small" business doesn't buy machines 100 at a time, they buy two or three at a time, depending on what's on sale at Office Depot. Of course, these busineses don't have "Select" contracts either.
But to address the parent post - Microsoft has been trying this "pay twice" trick since the Windows 3.1 days, and it's only partially successful.
Big business isn't in the habit of getting ripped off by a supplier. They know what the licence contract says. But, they also know that they end up double-paying for a certain percentage of machines. Even though the Windows 98 Upgrade Project was declared a success, there's probably still machines out there running 95 or even 3.1. On the other side, departments may have already bought NT or 2000 for one reason or another, or aren't going through corporate purchasing for whatever reason.
It's easier just to pay MS for the site licence, get the discount and the tech support than to try to audit each damn machine. You are double paying for a few machines, and single paying for others that won't be upgraded, but at least you are legal.
In the entire computer industry, there is only one company where outsiders actually care what the new models are going to look like.
Did anyone care what the Compaq iPaq looked like? The new Dell Latitude? The new Sun? The new AS/400? Those companies would beg to have fan sites printing rumors and unauthorized pictures about their new products.
It's never happened before that there's any interest in this sort of thing. Compare this to the auto industry, where every mag has a future model section. Why? Cars are a lot more than Consumer Reports ratings, MPG and HP.
Face it, the market's getting saturated, and you can't just sell product by being a "100% clone" or 1166 Mhz or.28 DPI any more. Functionally, for most people, computers have leveled off, and in that situation, style starts to sell. Apple knows they are in the catbird seat in that department, and are going to make damn sure they keep their advantage.
No, it was a Internet Explorer/Windows bug (it should allow access to DOS devices, no matter how integrated it is).
Of course, local DOS programs can do anything of a million things to crash your machine -- it's the responsibility of the applications to protect you from that sort of thing.
The mail thing in IIS 4/5 is a simple drop-box and forwarder. I doubt even Microsoft would have the balls to try to sell it to ISPs as a "commercial" quality MTA. It looks like the CIS mail and news servers were different beasts all together, although you are right about the rest of it ending up in Site Server.
The real problem IMHO is that Microsoft has nothing that even remotely compares to Sendmail.
Correction: Microsoft had a product called Commercial Internet Mail Server. Nobody bought it, it was blotted out of MS Official History, and one of the few references I can find to it on their site is the notice that support is being cancelled.
It's possible they hacked this to get it to work under W2000 for internal purposes. I'll bet someone's nut that they ain't using Exchange (which supposedly had a role in the failure of the last conversion).
killed because all of Apple's big software suppliers (read: M$, Adobe, Quark) hated the idea that all of their products would be obsolete
Sure OpenDoc had very little developer support but the real reason for that was that OpenDoc never shipped for Windows in a working form. (Blame WordPerfect for that.)
Microsoft OLE/COM is similar to OpenDoc, but that hasn't got MS worried that they might be obsoleted. On the contrary -- they love the way it makes 'integration' easy for them, and they love the third party developer support that it brings to programs-er-platforms like MS Office.
(Of course, by the the OpenDoc shipped, MS had OLE working on the Macintosh, so there's no way they would back OpenDoc.)
Back in the day, you could get MMU add-on units for the 020 Mac II (From Apple) and the LC (third party). It was a fairly common add-on because you couldn't use MacOS virtual memory without it.
Slashdot Mirror
That graph is actually much more informative -- it shows how *both* Linux and Windows NT will have pretty good growth rates in an expanding market.
Meanwhile, Unix and NetWare will have a fixed size userbase. When the number of servers is so dramatically increasing though, that's very bad news.
Anyway, Good News for Linux does not necessarily equal Bad News for Microsoft.
It gives us a rough minimum number of machines with Linux on them.
It does no such thing. If anything, retail sales of Linux are going to be to newbies and the MCSE gearhead faction that are just looking to play around with some new toy. The systems they are going on are probably duel boot workstations, and the odds are that they are going to be booted into Windows a large percentage of the time.
On the other hand, the Linux saavy crowd who run the OS full time or nearly full time are more likely to download it or buy it at cheapbytes. Real servers at work usually have good Internet connectivity and admins that don't need installation handholding.
Furthermore, because (unlike MS) Linux vendors don't have special "Upgrade" versions, it's impossible to know if a given sale/download of Linux is going onto a new machine or a machine that already has Linux on it. Since most Linux vendors have a pretty aggro upgrade schedule this throws the numbers off -- all those sales/downloads can't be new Linux installs.
What would really be interesting would be to get Dell or IBM's numbers on Linux preinstalls. Given IBM's recent behavior, I suspect those numbers look very good for Linux.
, it is necessary to give the copyright holder credit for the information on display
The pictures had something like "(c)AppleInsider.com" on them. There was no mention that they were Apple owned pictures.
Not cynical at all, because it happened. Microsoft has something called VML. I think they pulled a Netscape-style submit-it-to-the-W3C-after-we've-already-shipped-i t type thing.
Multi-monitors are very useful for graphics or video work. It's possible he invested in his setup for reasons other than playing flight sims.
(I used to pick up old fixed frequency Apple monitors and obsolete NuBus video cards for cheap or free and hook them up to my six-slot IIfx. People are usually impressed when they see a wall of monitors on your desk, so much so they don't notice that your computer is a slow piece of junk!)
I'm not even sure there ever was a product called MS-DOS 2.0.
There was "IBM PC DOS by Microsoft", "Compaq DOS by Microsoft", "Acer DOS by Microsoft", and so on. If "MS-DOS" ever shipped with that written on the box before version 4, I never saw it.
The only part of the proposed MS-OS that seems to have anything to do with .NET is the IIS web server (and even that might be 'middleware'). If so, MS-Apps just bundles Apache with an ASP+ module (hey, it's 'winning' anyway.)
.NET infrastructure. (The OS licencing issues being the core of the anti-trust case.) This increases the percieved cost of .NET stuff by quite a bit, because it's no longer "for free".
All of the stuff about not being COM-dependant seems to be a radical turn away from Microsoft's usual operating system integration tactics. From Windows Everywhere to Windows Nowhere, it seems.
This defeats the breakup to some extent by loading the MS-Apps side. However, at the least, they can't force PC OEMs to pre-install the
Right, and getting rid of this stuff in VisualBasic.net is one stick to drive people to C#
They probably need pointers to do certain things, like talk to the Win32 API.
Eventually: it will either be Flash, W3C DHTML + Time extentions + SVG, Microsoft PPT format. Think TV. (Yes, I'm a cynical coot.)
I just want to say that I understand your problem and that it seems that Microsoft's policies are designed to particularly screw businesses of your size. And I'd guess that your situation is actually pretty common.
If you are small, buy everything retail, and stay legal, you have no problems with Microsoft. If you are large, you can get bare systems, pay Microsoft for a fancy support agreement, you have no problem. However, if you are big enough to site licence, but too small to have any clout with MS or the vendor, too bad.
What can you do? I dunno -- Find a new hardware vendor, a small clone shop perhaps? Buy a year's worth of computers at one time from your vendor to get them bare? Threaten MS that you won't install/licence BackOffice apps unless they let up on you? Site licence W2000, and buy machiens with 98 to minimize the loss? Screw it and go illegal? It's a tough problem.
I believe Amazon.com had to pay off the lesbian bookstore. In short, they didn't "win", they settled.
Actually, I wish folks like you would just recommend Flash or PDF to clients that want 'printed output'-like pages. Then we can get the HTML back nice and simple, and it will be easier for me to add dynamic content to pages that aren't junked up with nested tables and spacer gifs.
Of course, this could backfire, and next thing you know I'd be writing a database backend to a Flash application.
The whole ActiveDirectory thing is enormously complex and there's very few people with real world experience with it. (And most of them are in Microsoft Consulting!)
People even managed to fuck up the old NT domain thing, which shipped for 13 years and had lots of people that understood how to do it right.
So, the fact that your company is doing any sort of W2K conversion effort shows that you are far, far ahead of the average American business.
They would, but it's not worth the trouble for a small fry order of 16 machines. Come back with a bigger PO, and they'll ship them as you like it.
Compaqs have been a pain in the ass for years. They have a horrible reputation for changing video, sound, and network chips in the middle of a product's model life. This makes them almost impossible to support with a disk image. Top that off with the fact that they like to pretend they still make "Compaq" Sound and Ethernet controllers, when in fact it's the same clone junk you find elsewhere.
On the other hand, you should have been able find drivers on their website.
5000 Employees = ~1700 new computers per year = You are a large enough customer that any vendor will ship you PCs in any configuration you like, including a custom image or even bare.
Some companies might be paying twice. The ones with half a brain aren't.
Of course, the typical "small" business doesn't buy machines 100 at a time, they buy two or three at a time, depending on what's on sale at Office Depot. Of course, these busineses don't have "Select" contracts either.
But to address the parent post - Microsoft has been trying this "pay twice" trick since the Windows 3.1 days, and it's only partially successful.
Big business isn't in the habit of getting ripped off by a supplier. They know what the licence contract says. But, they also know that they end up double-paying for a certain percentage of machines. Even though the Windows 98 Upgrade Project was declared a success, there's probably still machines out there running 95 or even 3.1. On the other side, departments may have already bought NT or 2000 for one reason or another, or aren't going through corporate purchasing for whatever reason.
It's easier just to pay MS for the site licence, get the discount and the tech support than to try to audit each damn machine. You are double paying for a few machines, and single paying for others that won't be upgraded, but at least you are legal.
I don't think that was as big of a secret as you make it out to be.
IIRC, there were actually press releases about Apple's alliance with Network Computer (the old Oracle spin-off, not the new one).
In the entire computer industry, there is only one company where outsiders actually care what the new models are going to look like.
.28 DPI any more. Functionally, for most people, computers have leveled off, and in that situation, style starts to sell. Apple knows they are in the catbird seat in that department, and are going to make damn sure they keep their advantage.
Did anyone care what the Compaq iPaq looked like? The new Dell Latitude? The new Sun? The new AS/400? Those companies would beg to have fan sites printing rumors and unauthorized pictures about their new products.
It's never happened before that there's any interest in this sort of thing. Compare this to the auto industry, where every mag has a future model section. Why? Cars are a lot more than Consumer Reports ratings, MPG and HP.
Face it, the market's getting saturated, and you can't just sell product by being a "100% clone" or 1166 Mhz or
No, it was a Internet Explorer/Windows bug (it should allow access to DOS devices, no matter how integrated it is).
Of course, local DOS programs can do anything of a million things to crash your machine -- it's the responsibility of the applications to protect you from that sort of thing.
The mail thing in IIS 4/5 is a simple drop-box and forwarder. I doubt even Microsoft would have the balls to try to sell it to ISPs as a "commercial" quality MTA. It looks like the CIS mail and news servers were different beasts all together, although you are right about the rest of it ending up in Site Server.
The real problem IMHO is that Microsoft has nothing that even remotely compares to Sendmail.
Correction: Microsoft had a product called Commercial Internet Mail Server. Nobody bought it, it was blotted out of MS Official History, and one of the few references I can find to it on their site is the notice that support is being cancelled.
It's possible they hacked this to get it to work under W2000 for internal purposes. I'll bet someone's nut that they ain't using Exchange (which supposedly had a role in the failure of the last conversion).
killed because all of Apple's big software suppliers (read: M$, Adobe, Quark) hated the idea that all of their products would be obsolete
Sure OpenDoc had very little developer support but the real reason for that was that OpenDoc never shipped for Windows in a working form. (Blame WordPerfect for that.)
Microsoft OLE/COM is similar to OpenDoc, but that hasn't got MS worried that they might be obsoleted. On the contrary -- they love the way it makes 'integration' easy for them, and they love the third party developer support that it brings to programs-er-platforms like MS Office.
(Of course, by the the OpenDoc shipped, MS had OLE working on the Macintosh, so there's no way they would back OpenDoc.)
Back in the day, you could get MMU add-on units for the 020 Mac II (From Apple) and the LC (third party). It was a fairly common add-on because you couldn't use MacOS virtual memory without it.