From: anonymous-remailer@shell.portal.com
Date: Sun, 29 Jan 95 21:40:08 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: alt.religion.your.operating.system.sucks
Message-ID: <199501300539.VAA18044@jobe.shell.portal.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Spif wrote:
>so your point, basically, is that the public will settle for whatever it 
>can get, and get easiest and cheapest, when it comes to software and 
>operating systems in particular.  

It always puzzles me that people on the net spend so much time griping
about Microsoft when the net tends towards libertarianism.  I would
think libertarians would welcome Microsoft's dominance, as a
validation of the free market in action.

I'm not saying you are libertarian, of course.

"Dos/Windows + applications available for Dos/Windows" are obviously
blowing out "unix + applications available for unix".

Normal people don't give a damn if source code is available for "power
tools" like PERL, sed, grep, wc, bc, strip, yacc, lex, puke, barf,
etc.

They want to cut and paste their spreadsheet charts into the word
processor they use, and email it to coworkers.

>certainly a growing market for internet-capable systems

OS/2 is internet friendly, Windows 95 will be friendly, etc.
Certainly unix will let you do more, but most people won't care about
the value of the extras, as long as a web browser, news reader, and
mail reader is available.

Some people on this list swear they never have to drop to a command
line with the cool tools they use with their SLIP accounts (except to
change their password).  If that's true, then any "advantage" unix has
is washed away.  How will the unix market grow (relative to other more
popular OS's) if internet access tools run the same on Windows and
OS/2 and Mac's as they do on unix?