[Linux-Discussion] MS: "Linux is going down."

  • From: John Madden <weez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: linux-discussion@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 31 Jan 2001 12:42:08 -0500

http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41527,00.html

Well, I guess I might as well pack it up and switch to Windows 2000, eh?

Once again, the MS Exec's prove themselves to be short-sighted.  From 
their "three key Linux trends to watch for in 2001:"

1) "A static growth rate."  Well, I doubt it, but hey, when you're already 
the biggest-shipping sever OS (IDC, for 1999.. or 2000?), you don't have a 
great deal of room to grow.  So *maybe* this will happen.

2) "lessening mainstream interest in the open source operating system"  
Uhm, yeah, I'm sure Oracle, IBM, and Sun are going to change their minds 
about their billions of dollars in investments.  Yup.  

3) "and a sharp decline in Linux-based companies' stock value"  This one, 
I believe.  But there are two problems with this: One, Wall street is 
about 99% clueless.  If you believe M$'s stock price, for example, you 
should read between the lines a bit more.  If you believe VA's stock 
price, you might be missing out on the chance to make some money.  Stock 
values are always either way over or way under, and in the meantime, no 
one's actually paying attention to what the company actually has to offer.

Two, who cares about what the stock price is?  Since when has stock price 
been a factor in how many NT machines versus how many Linux machines I 
install?  Hell no, I install Linux because I don't *ever* get paged at 2am 
to go fix a problem -- it has nothing to do with how well VA's stock price 
is.  VA's only been around.. what?  a year?  Linux has been creeping into 
the server room since 1991, and will continue to do so, even if the big 
"Linux companies" go under.  We don't need a company - that's the whole 
point of this thing in the first place.  

Duhhhh... :)

Oh, and in this article, they point to the "recent security problems with 
Linux," but they neglect to mention that the problem they linked to was a 
problem with BIND, a DNS server that runs on all Unices (and I believe 
there's a port to Windows).  That's a BIND problem, not a Linux problem.

John






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