Date: Fri, 5 Dec 97 02:11:50 -0900
From: EvangeList <evangelist@apple.com>
Subject: Tidbit - NT Upgrade Woes

Keyword: Advocacy, Windows Daymares

This tidbit is from:

Bruce Toback

The November 24, 1997 issue of InfoWorld <http://www.infoworld.com> has 
an article about NT5.0 under the headline "Windows wobbles forward: NT 
5.0 swings, misses." Noting that NT 5.0 is a giant step backwards for 
users of portables, the article states "IT departments managing Windows 
NT 4.0-based notebooks that want to move to 5.0 are in for a rude 
awakening... the upgrade will disable power management, socket services, 
and plug-and-play features in today's NT 4.0..."

As a consultant who does a lot of Windows development, I regularly meet 
people who get stars in their eyes when they think of WinNT. But as 
articles like InfoWorld's show, NT is in fact a huge, monolithic 
operating system with all the problems expected of such a design. It is a 
tribute to Microsoft's engineers that they can keep this behemoth working 
even as well as it does, but as NT 5.0 slips further into the future 
(noted in a related article in the same issue of InfoWorld), it's clear 
that the system is reaching a practical limit on complexity.  
__________________________
Digital Guy Sez:

Someone asked me why we post stuff like this to the EvangeList. The 
second paragraph underscores the prime reason: However it was managed, 
there is this perception of NT as the holy grail of scalable enterprise 
operating systems.  Never mind that a unix based system is far more 
scalable, and can even be tried out for FREE (BSD, Linux) as a way of 
seeing if it's right for you. The irony is I suspect the high cost of NT 
has a lot to do with it's mystique.

There's this old TV skit where a couple of mooks come into a large amount 
of free produce, legitmately. They decide to sell it off cheap, thinking 
to make a couple of bucks and share their good fortune. The problem is, 
no one will buy.

So they jack up all of the prices, in some cases more than it would cost 
to buy in a local supermarket, and the whole batch is sold out in a 
manner of hours.

Put on a good show and price it high enough, there are people inside and 
outside of IS deparments who will buy it simply because it MUST be worth 
it. Trust the corporation to a FREE OS? Never!

I have to disagree with the idea that an OS can only be so complex, 
though. The problem is that at some point Bill is going to have to 
redesign from the ground up (NT 6.0?) in order to produce something that 
can grow into the future.