"Steven T. Hatton" wrote:
>
> In the recent flurry of Bill Gates quotings posted here of late, I seem
> to recall somewhere that Bill said browsers are becoming to complex and
> sophisticated to be given away for free anymore. Is he saying that
> because he can no longer afford to dump his products onto the market at
> the expense of other start-up competitors, or because he no longer feels
> he has a competitor. Netscape seems to have been pretty well crushed.
> Sure AOL bought Netcenter and partnered with Sun to take over product
> development. I just don't see these organizations being as aggressive
> in producing subsequent versions of the Netscape browser. I have been
> under the impression that Netscape is providing support for
> mozilla.org. My guess is that may be less substantial in the future.
I think that the lack of a new Netscape browser yet is not terribly
serious. If you have tried running any of the builds of Gecko or the
Milestone releases of mozilla, the browser is extremely impressive.
It's true that IE has been gaining substantial marketshare recently, but
as they themselves showed (with the help of a monopoly OS), the browser
market can change very rapidly because a new browser is only a download
away. I think mozilla looks really promising, and that it will handily
outclass IE when it comes out.
> I hope the Netscape servers do continue to be viable options for
> organizations who want relatively easy to use inter/intranet servers.
> There are currently aspects of Netscape's servers that make them
> superior to IIS. Two of these are that Netscape currently does a better
> job supporting PKI, and that Netscape servers run on Unix.
You may be forgetting that most web sites on the net run on UNIX and
most of those are Apache. The impact of that is easily underestimated.
Also, people and companies seem to be getting pretty sick of the defacto
standards that both Netscape and IE have been introducing into HTML, and
the fact that Netscape 5 will be $100 standards compliant will have
major impact.
> I see this
> first gap closing. I don't remember having heard about MS working on a
> 64-bit NT. Solaris 7 *is* 64-bit. This means that, at the medium to
> high end, Unix has a considerable advantage.
64-bit NT is being developed for Merced.
> I warn people not to under
> estimate the value of the small end. That is where a lot of the action
> is likely to happen in the near future, and if you get the revenues from
> the small end, you will have the bucks to break into the high end.
This is a very good point, and one that the major UNIX vendors are not
taking to heart. Go out and check out progress on getting Linux
certified as UNIX. The other UNIX vendors have to approve of another
UNIX brand, and most of them are very willing to do it. They probably
figure that Linux can shore up the low to middle and give them a buffer
against NT while they retain the high. What they are neglecting is that
in 5 to 6 years, and possibly much sooner, Linux will be scalable to
those levels on a great number of platforms and their high end will not
be in danger of NT, but of Linux.
> There had been a push to port the Netscape servers to Linux. I believe
> this has been pushed onto the back burner. Again I don't see Sun
> jumping up and down about supporting Linux.
I don't think this is *that* important. Apache works very well and is
very popular and can handle most of the stuff people want to do. The
one app that I really want to see ported to Linux (besides Eudora for
myself :-)) is Apple WebObjects. People may dismiss Apple as an
enterprise player, but WebObjects is the most popular development
enviornment for high-end middle ware on the net. It was the first and
is still the best. Browse Apple's pages on it and look for yourself.
> MS may fear Linux, but Sun
> *should* fear Linux. At the very high end Sun will probably hold onto
> an advantage for several years. At the ultrasparc II level, a dual
> processor Merced running Linux could probably put a bite into Sun's
> market share. As I remember, Linus said something along the lines of
> '64-bit Linux? No problem! The inherent design of Linux will support
> that naturally.'
This is what major UNIX vendors are ignoring. But Sun is a major
hardware business and their machines could still keep the profit margin
healthy even if they shipped with Linux.
> I have strayed a bit from where I started this post. To get back to
> browsers, I don't see anybody providing a quality integrated browser
> solution for Linux other than Netscape. Mozilla.org may come through,
> but they haven't produced anything more than beta demos so far. My
> guess is many people don't see the need for many of the bells and
> whistles that modern browsers have. Many of the features of a browser
> are hidden from the user, and are not currently in extensive use.
I don't want an integrated browser, and quite frankly, neither does
anybody who knows a thing about UI. Microsoft had the right idea, ass
backwards. They thought "Lets integrate the net into the OS by using a
browser for the local machine. Wrong. Apple had the right idea: "Let's
integrate the net into the OS by making the OS *part* of the net.
> One
> that I am most concerned with is the ability of IE to process VBscript.
> If Bill gets sufficient control of the browser market he can make it so
> that internet servers can be set up to generate pages containing
> VBscript and ActiveX and function with most clients on the internet. If
> that happens all browsers will have to process VBscript and ActiveX in
> order to be viable competitors to IE. Most people won't want to haste
I grok, but the battle is far from over, particularly since perl is
still the lingua franca of dynamic web applications. But again, if
you've ever seen WebObjects in action, or coded with it, you'd wonder
why people use anything else. XML, DHTML and other standards, I
believe, will prevail over VBscript primarily because of portability and
standards.
> with trying to find and run anything less capable than IE. In this
> scenario Bill gains a tighter grip on the browser market, which he
> already announced he will be charging you for in the future. Not only
> that, do you really believe MS will provide the Unix community with a
> version of IE that is as reliable and functional as the win32 version?
> I don't. And I don't expect Bill will lift a finger to provide anything
> viable for Linux.
I don't think we'll nedd it, but it's wait and see right now.
> I may just be paranoid. I don't have a full grasp of every aspect of
> this technology, but I am going through IIS training, and have worked
> with both Apache and SuiteSpot. I have worked with NT since it was in
> Beta, and have also worked with Novell, Solaris (sparc and x86), and
> Linux. Not to mention DOS and Windows 3.1. My instincts tell me there
> is a real danger here.
"Being paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to ge you" :-) I wish I
knew who said this. Anyway, it's good to keep an eye on this.
> For those who like to tell me that major organizations cannot run
> reliably on NT, I checked today. The Network I am on is world wide, and
> has more than 70 NT domains. I don't have NT related problems very
> often on this network. I am not trying to sell NT. I *am* getting my
> MCSE because I believe it is a professionally prudent thing to do. I
> like Linux. It smells like freedom to me, and I love freedom. I'm just
> trying to get some sober thinking going on about these subjects.
My company Infonet runs some pretty major worldwide networks partly on
NT. Sober thinking is what will decide Linux's fate, and I think we
have some pretty good heads in the community. Also, since Linux isn't
dependent on any company, and people are always going to hack, and it's
GPL'ed (the *most* important thing about Linux), it's not going to go
away. And it will always get better. Linux is like the Sixties, but
rational. Idealism with a purpose *and* a plan.
I'm a hacker. I like to hack and fiddle and prod and do stuff with my
system just to see it work. The GPL made Linux *possible*. Freedom is
the most important thing to me. It it were not about freedom, It would
probably be a very tough decision for me to use BeOS as a client or
Linux. I would write a lot more code for Be (like I should be doing
:-)) if it were libre.
--
lunaslide * PGP key->pgpkeys.mit.edu port 11371
* * * * * *
Yep. I have a very active imagination; it's been a personal
condition of mine for years now. * -Bruce Sterling
* * * * *
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