Fragmented UNIX world? - Feedback from David Boyce
Mon, 15 Jun 1998 20:56:09 -0400
John,
Looking at your unix-nt document, it occurs to me that there's one anti-Unix argument which you didn't counter. In my experience people often criticize the Unix world as fragmented, consisting as it does of Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, etc. and say they prefer the "single solution" of Microsoft. But in their attempts to overcome the DOS legacy without leaving customers behind, MS has forked 8 living children: Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, NT 3.51, NT 4.0, NT 5.0, Windows CE, and DOS. And this is even before you get into Workstation vs Server vs Enterprise Server etc. While most companies don't have to support all those platforms (any more than most Unix shops support all variants), the fragmentation is far more comparable than MS marketing would like to admit (and in far fewer years). This is one of those things that somehow never gets brought up about Windows - in the same way they used to say Reagan was the Teflon president, MS is somehow the Teflon software company.
This is not so much an anti-NT point as the refutation of a putative anti-Unix point, of course, but it may have a place in your document.
-David
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