OS War Over, OS Dead, Sun Won, Redmond Lost

from the who-knew? dept

Someone needs to tell Bill Gates, but Sun's Scott McNealy has decided that Microsoft has lost the OS wars. This seems to be a bit of wishful thinking, but the idea is that people are increasingly moving to a web services world, and who would possibly want to go with buggy Microsoft for that? At least that seems to be McNealy's thinking, which suggests (for his own purposes, of course) he's ignoring a good part of the last twenty years of Microsoft history. Perhaps he will be right someday, but it's a little early to call a winner, and I would think most betting people would side with Microsoft over Sun on this one. Update: Here's another article with a few more details on McNealy's speech, including quotes where he makes fun of Gates and Ballmer for dropping out of school, suggesting they got a "headstart" on Sun that way. Of course, maybe if it hadn't taken McNealy seven tries to get into Stanford business school he would have had a headstart on Microsoft.
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  1. identicon
    Richard NC Arsehill, 1 Aug 2003 @ 10:48am

    No Subject Given

    That would be like the Mozilla foundation suddenly declaring that they won the browser war. Although the outcome of the current browser war has yet to be determined, they certainly did not win the first one.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Con Tendem, 1 Aug 2003 @ 10:52am

    heh

    Sadly, McNealy begins to sound more and more like Ellison. It is unclear whether the OS war winner will be Microsoft or Linux, but it is patently obvious it won't be Sun.
    [Why is it patently obvious?]
    Because Sun has neither the huge installed base and developer corps that MS has or cheap and easily available hardware platform like Linux and MS. It has excellent stability and scalability, but Linux is catching up fast, and MS is not that far behind either, at least not for small and medium-sized applications. Indeed, even if Linux or MS never catch up to Sun it is likely to be relegated more and more to a niche high-availability market and supplanted by cheaper and cheaper boxes running Web Services on Windows and Linux.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 Aug 2003 @ 12:13pm

    Second Place Trophy

    Will it go to Sun, Apple, or one of the proprietary Lightweight Unix commercial operating systems... oh, sorry, Linux?

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 1 Aug 2003 @ 11:50pm

    What planet is this guy living on...

    Yeah, Sun won the OS war... right.

    That must be why Microsoft is *still* making so god damned much money in a down economey...f

    It must be the reason that Larry Ellison bemoans the fact that Microsoft *CAN* raise prices on products in a down economey (...and he can't)

    The list just goes on and on.

    Mean while rumor has it the the only reason Ellison and McNealy are still on friendly terms is because neigher one of them has firgured out who gives the blow-job to whom.

    I guess Ignorance *IS* bliss (except for not getting the gratuitous blow-job part).

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Richard NC Arsehill, 4 Aug 2003 @ 12:12pm

    Re: What planet is this guy living on...

    So if Sun won the OS war, what of Java?

    link to this | view in thread ]


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