RE: Yet another reason to hate Ms
Dan Kohn (dan@teledesic.com)
Tue, 28 Jan 1997 13:27:01 -0800
>>Oh, and Bill funds half my paycheck, but that's totally irrelevant. ;-)
>
>>So if Bill didn't fund half your paycheck would your engineers be using
>>UltraSparc or SGI?
>
>No, Tim, and the reason why is important. We have a couple UltraSparcs
>for the few pieces of software that aren't available yet on NT, which
>we access using X Windows from the NT desktops. All of those software
>products have an NT version in the works. By contrast, we can't get
>the productivity applications (yes, MS Office) on Unix desktops, and we
>wanted to avoid 2 computers on a desktop. More to the point, there is
>a HUGE price/performance advantage on Wintel desktops over UltraSparc
>and SGI. Not just on the base system, but memory, graphics cards,
>everything.
>
>Fine, MS-DOS sucked. Fine, Win3.1 sucked. Fine, Win95 only has parity
>with MacOS (e.g., multitasking is much stronger, file system is
>weaker). Fine, NT isn't perfect yet. But Wintel has dominance, and
>that translates into an ability to price down the learning curve that
>no other vendor can match. It's like the old Toshiba line. Q: How
>much will it cost. A: You decide, and we'll tell you how many you
>have to order. MSFT has the market share, and that gives them a huge
>advantage in both price and range of applications available.
>
> - dan