Date: Mon, 20 Jan 1997 13:05:20 +0000 From: Robin Melville <robmel@innotts.co.uk> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Cursing the sky (was: Commerical applications ...) Message-ID: <l03010d00af0916479d8a@[194.176.130.62]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970119163151.12852A-100000@wakko.gil.net> References: <199701192045.NAA14114@phaeton.artisoft.com>
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At 5:07 pm -0500 19/1/97, Keith Leonard wrote: >Freebsd should have installation options for a straight forward simple 'I >got a 14" vga monitor with a keyboard and mouse' setup.... >This is were MS grabed the market... I wouldn't agree with all this. Windows/95 can be a nightmare to set up.. this isn't the issue. What has made Windows successful is a virtuous circle. The corporates all bought IBM/compatibles in the 80's --> it got to be the biggest in the market --> more software was written for it than the (better) alternatives (ie. Macs) --> people buy a) what they know, b) what their friend knows, c) what the program they want will run on --> Windows growth accelerates. On top of this, MSoft grabbed the lion share of the corporate office software market with (pretty reasonable) applications like Word and Excel. Apple has held on in niches (which have opened up wider now with the demand for multimedia content design etc). FreeBSD and Linux have really remarkably little chance of any kind of role in the workstation area, except in bits of the education market, as a development platform, and in the hackers' toy department. Even if you /could/ make it runnable out of the box on most h/w -- not much to run on it! However, FreeBSD has something which is worth thousands in the small (and even giant) corporate sector: a fantastically reliable server platform at almost zero cost. The nearest competitors (eg SCO) not only cost several thousand to get going, but don't work anything like as well. Since more & more companies from the tiniest to the hugest are networking their PCs, adding intranet for fun and instruction, and wanting to connect to the big wide world, the potential is huge. With samba and netatalk add-ins, web and mail servers etc. etc. you can meet all your back-end needs for the cost of a discarded PC with a few added bits. Maybe a wholesale shift to the Java equivalent of X-Terms will mark the end of the evil empire, but the way its going, this can only make the superb work of the FreeBSD team even more valuable. If anything will grow BSD influence it will be development of solid server-type applications... a good client-server database would be a start :-) Best regards, Robin. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Robin Melville, Addiction Information Services Nottingham Alcohol & Drug Team Tel: +44 (0)115 952 9478 Fax: +44 (0)115 952 9421 work: robmel@nadt.org.uk home: robmel@innotts.co.uk Pages: http://www.innotts.co.uk/~robmel (home page) http://www.innotts.co.uk/nadt (substance misuse pages) ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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