Sorry.

[Terry Lambert]

Johnson David wrote:
> On Wednesday 17 September 2003 12:08 pm, Jon Mercer wrote:
> > 1. Desktop computing is hardly the area where massive efficiency is
> > going to be all the rage in the future. Windows can hardly be
> > described as the paragon of fast computing on the desktop.
> 
> But unfortunately, the desktop is all anyone thinks about. Just look at
> Linux. IBM, SGI and Sun are all gungho over Linux, the media is paying
> attention, it's being scaled up to the really big iron and scaled down
> to the smalled embedded devices. But all you ever hear from a lot of
> *Linux* advocates is "Linux will fail without the desktop".

They are correct.

Without a viable alternative desktop, you are always in danger
of a vendor wielding monopolistic power in the marketplace, and
using that power to leverage a similar monopoly in the server
space, squeezing you out via unfair trade practices.  Yes, a
monopolist would have to violate Sherman and probably RICO to
do this, but it's been known to happen.


> Maybe Linux will grab all the Fortune 500 companies. But I see no reason
> why FreeBSD can't grab all of the small business market.

I expect that it can't for the same reason IBM GSB was unable
to grab that market: the market is not as homogenous as the
people who refer to it as if it were one big lump would like
to believe, and therefore you will never see a majority vendor
for anything other than commodity products.  I class Windows
boxes as a commodity for the purposes of this discussion, and
that's primarily because of their third party software base.

-- Terry