[TAG] 'Unix beats Windows' - says Microsoft!

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 02:05:21PM -0800, Mike Orr wrote:
> On 11/11/05, Jimmy O'Regan <jimregan at o2.ie> wrote:
> > http://blogs.zdnet.com/Murphy/index.php?p=459
> >
> > "What's noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity [MS
> > Research's new kernel] to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and
> > almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants."
> 
> I wonder how long it will be before Microsoft releases an OS that is
> at least Unix compatible at the API and user-command level.  That
> would solve the biggest hassle of MS systems, that they use completely
> different commands to do the same thing, and one doesn't want to spend
> a year learning stuff that is valid for only one OS and could change
> at any time.  Apple drank the kool-aid, so maybe MS will eventually
> too.  Even just having fork() would halve the difficulty of porting
> programs.

Apple decided to bank on what they know - their hardware and their UI
design ability. They were never in the OS competition anyway, since you
couldn't run their OS on anything other than their hardware.

Micr0s0ft can't, short of committing suicide, do anything broadly
Unix-compatible with their OS, because the automatic next question from
the users would be "then what the hell are we paying you money for?" If
their entire user base was familiar with Unix commands and practices,
they'd be out of business in a week.


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *