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	Rex Ballard - Director of Electronic Distribution
	Standard & Poor's/McGraw-Hill
	Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect
	the Management of the McGraw-Hill Companies.
	http://cnj.digex.net/~rballard


On 8 Jun 1996, Orc wrote:

> In article <01bb557b$74e3dfd0$ed8d389d@toddnwks>,
> Todd Needham [Microsoft]  wrote:
> >
> >Yes, UNIX currently has the larger market here, but that's changing as
> >vendors like DEC, IBM, HP, Anderson Consulting and such are delivering
> >these same customized applications on Windows NT.  It is my personal
> >belief that Windows NT will overtake UNIX in this market as well (and yes,
> >most of the folks here probably don't believe that).

Since Microsoft is forcing these vendors to take windows NT (If they want
to continue to receive Windows Licenses of ANY KIND), they have been
forced to "play ball".  Isn't it interesting that each of these vendors
also has a working implementation of Unix, AND a working implementation of
Linux.

> Like, duh.
> 
> If I want Unix on P6-class hardware, I get to pay for it.  If I want NT
> on P6-class hardware, I get it when I buy the machine.  If I _don't want
> NT on P6-class hardware, I get it when I buy the machine, too.  I fully
> expect that NT will be on 80% of the desktops in the world within 18
> months, after the P6 becomes the 1997 commodity chip.

There is a way to not have to pay the $600 "Bundleware price" of Microsoft
products.  Most dealers and manufacturers sell what is called a "College
Kid Special".  It is a PC without a CD-Rom drive.  You can get one for
about $500-$800 and add your own CD-Rom later for about $150.  The special
comes with MS-Dos and Windows 3.1.  You can then use FIPS to repartition
the drive, install Linux, and have a fast workstation for under $1000.

> Thank the marketing people who had the bright idea to do exclusive
> licensing five years ago for this non-discovery.   It certainly has
> nothing to do with the merits of the software.

Microsoft has been doing this since about 1976/7 when it demanded that
MITS pay for it's BASIC with a Lump-Sum advance.  MITS paid, hoping to
keep Gates and Allen from writing a version for the SWTP computer.  Gates
ported it to the Commodore PET instead, effectively destroying MITS.

Then he destroyed the PET by writing for the TRS-80.  Then he destroyed
the TRS-80 by Writing for the IBM-PC, then pushed the application vendors
into developing for OS/2.  When IBM wanted a 32 bit version, Gates
delivered Windows 3.0, along with a suite of Microsoft Applications
instead, OS/2 2.0 was finally finished a year later by IBM.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, AT&T had given source to MIT, Berkely and
others for PDP-8 and PDP-11.  The vendors wanted the "high margin" of
proprietary operating systems.  I remember hearing stories from one of the
sys admins about spinning down the removable disk drive containing UNIX
and putting in the RT/11 (Later RSTS, then VMS) to keep the DEC
representative from reformatting the UNIX drive.

UNIX has almost always propagated itself as a function of USER DEMAND,
rather than Producer Promotion.  Initially, it was probably just the low
price tag (Cheap to free, including source code for Version 6).  By the
time Berkely and AT&T started to actually "promote" (provide professional
technical support) UNIX, the familiar interfaces, abundance of
applications (In source code format), and rapid application development
tools like sed, awk, lex, and yacc, were making UNIX an institution.

To Vendors, UNIX is more like a "pest" that won't go away.  They hate it
because it does not give them a marketing edge, and any technological
advance that might give them a marketing edge is either superceded or
ultimately forced to compete with GPL software.  The margin on VMS or NT
based software can be 80% of the price.  The margin on Unix derivatives
can be as low as 10% of the price.

Unix users are very hard to count.  Almost every person who uses a web
browser will use unix pretty regularly without knowing it. Variants of
Unix have been passed around on the internet or via other communications
networks since the release of Version 6 back in 1975.

The infrastructure which developed as an outgrowth of UNIX (TCP/IP, X11
Windows, Client/Server, RPC, and SMP) have been reluctantly adopted by
vendors, including Microsoft, over time.

And like the "Sudden Explosion of the Internet" ( which had been growing
at 20%/month for almost 10 years until someone "discovered" that there
were over 8 million TCP/IP users), there is a similar "Ground Swell" in
the Unix community.  People who don't want to throw away a perfectly
functional 386 or 486 computer just because they've upgraded to "NT/95",
are buying books with CD-Rom's pasted to the backs.  QUE lists Linux books
among it's top sellers.  There are over 21 titles, each with a CD-Rom from
Slackware or Red Hat, or Both.  These don't even get counted into the
DataPro surveys.  Neither did TCP/IP systems or Unix servers when Novell
was claiming to be the leading "NOS" (carefully worded to exclude Unix and
TCP/IP as protocols).

Linux seems to be growing at a rate of about 10%/month, perhaps faster. 
It is sustaining this growth in the face of minimal advertizing, poor
press coverage (the reporter tries to install and evaluate a "text only" 
version and decides it's too "primative".  It's more like a snowball
that's coming down the mountain.  Microsoft is right in it's path, and
looking the other way (defending against OS/2 and Commercial
Implementations of Unix). 

Meanwhile, we have Caldera, Slackware, Red Hat, and 3 other Linux
"Vendors" competing to be the "Best" provider by providing great packages
including commercially supported software like Word Perfect.

Go to sleep Bill, enjoy your wife and kids.  You're looking a bit old,
Linus is looking the way you used to look when you were first writing
BASIC interpreters.


	Rex Ballard.

>                ____
>   david parsons \bi/ Nostradamous has nothing to fear from you.
>                  \/
> 
> 


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Mon Jul  1 14:35:21 1996
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