> What the hell. MS should port Windows to Linux. They should get out > the OS business anyway.
Don't kid yourself, RH may not be the only company semi-abandoning the regular consumer. I don't think it's a made decision, but as many others have pointed out, MS makes way more money on a copy of Office than it does XP Home. Much like Oracle's (by some accounts failed) attempt, Microsoft will strength their focus on the application space. The OS isn't going to go away, but they're going to see some huge gains from being able to maintain single code bases for various products (and much smaller code bases with their MS Business Framework that abstracts a ton of things they were doing cross-application - consider it to be a lot like Apache Jakarta Commons) across multiple platforms (Windows and OSX alone will be worth it - oh, and look, a chunk of other platforms become possible too). IIRC, it's called their "Green" project or something like that. The savings to MS for their own application development will be huge, but the real gains are the ones that can happen at ISV's where those same gains in efficiency can be realized. MS realizes what Java did for cross-platform and their not blind to it, but they'll of course have to focus on Windows both for being the dominant OS at the moment and because it's their own dog food. Honestly, this is why I'm with Miguel on the possibilities of the Mono project and .NET as a framework - it's not that MS is leading the charge (honestly, I'm indifferent to it being their project to start with), but it gives me all the cross-platform power (potentially, we're certainly not "quite" there yet) without typing me to a language. And to be fair, there were efforts that targeted other languages to the Java bytecodes/VM, but they never seemed to mature. And that can certainly happen with .NET as well. The goal is "any language(s), any OS, one code base". Java started with "part 2" of that, .NET is starting with "part 1", but both have to fill in the other part to achieve the goal. I'm just wishing Mono the best of luck :) Wow, sorry, didn't mean for this to ramble so long :) James -- James Manning <http://www.sublogic.com/james/> GPG Key fingerprint = B913 2FBD 14A9 CE18 B2B7 9C8E A0BF B026 EEBB F6E4 -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
