From: daleh@ix.netcom.com (Dale Harrison (AEGIS))
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 95 20:28:53 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: alt.religion.your.operating.system.sucks
Message-ID: <199501300427.UAA21533@ix3.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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You wrote: 

>The only real barrier left to UNIX becoming the OS of choice is 
>commercial app support (things like word processors and etc. becoming 
>readily available and inexpensive).

I don't mean to toss gasoline onto this fire, but......

Unix as we know has a vanishingly small probability of ever becoming 
'mainstream'. There's a two-orders-of-magnitude gap between the installed 
base of Dos/Windows and that of Unix. That gap has grown, not marrowed 
over time. This is however no reflection on the obvious technical merits 
of Unix. Market dominance is based not on technical superiority, but 
rather on technical sufficiency. Once an OS acheives technical 
sufficiency any further technical improvements will have a diminishing 
marginal effect on that OS's market performance. Once the OS is 
technically sufficient, non-technical factors begin to dominate. The 
market failure of WinNT is a classic example of this. Its failure is 
unrelated to its technical merits (or lack thereof), but rather on 
econmic and social factors the even a company withe the marketing muscle 
of MicroSoft has not yet been able to overcome. (OS/2 is of course an 
example of an even more dismal, perhaps terminal, failure for many of the 
same reasons.)

Dale H.