“Wasn’t too long ago that Microsoft’s Bill Gates had the same
drawing power as a rock star and kids would line up around the
block just to get a glimpse of the nerd who made good. But Monday
night, it was Linus Torvalds, developer of Linux, who held court
over semihysterical young groupies, while Gates trotted out the
establishment party line….”
“To be fair, Microsoft’s doing a lot of forward thinking,
moving new products that will quite frankly be better than the
fair-to-middlin’ stuff they’ve pushed for the past five years.
Looking at the vast range of Windows-less products at Comdex,
though, I’ve got to wonder if they left the quality part of the
equation until too late. Will anyone believe it if Windows
2000 DataCenter finally gets the reliability thing right?”
“Linux got its own show-within-show here this year, and the
range of applications being offered is amazing given the operating
system’s age. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Compaq and virtually every
other hardware maker here is busy pointing out that they were the
first last year to recognize the overwhelming importance of Linux
as a Web server platform.”