“One thing I’ll give the Kids at Redmond–they certainly are a
consistent bunch. After a few weeks of watching a lot of the people
in the Linux community snipe at each other, they are likely flush
with new confidence in the strength of their latest operating
system: Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition (ME).”
“What’s that you say? Never heard of Windows ME? Join the club.
Not since Microsoft Bob has a product launch from Redmond been so
limply received by retailers. It’s barely stocked in my local
computer store–compared to the launch of Windows 95 and 98, when
every shelf in the store was covered with sky-blue boxes
(interestingly enough, the local store had more boxes of Linux
distributions than WinME). WinME is showing up on pre-loaded boxes
of course, so it will slowly enter the PC market, but not with any
great speed, that’s for sure.”
“This is not exactly the best forum for making this
announcement, I’ll grant you, but it can be held in contrast to
some upcoming releases that will make the pulse of any Linux
enthusiast quicken: Red Hat Linux 7, KDE 2, and most importantly of
all, the upcoming 2.4 kernel. In fact, this news is creating a much
bigger stir in the general PC populace than in recent years. The
reason? Because, right or wrong, the public perception of Microsoft
is of a company that has gone as far as it can go. Linux, it can
further be said, is the Next Big Thing–the technology that’s on
its way up.”