[ Thanks to Kelly
McNeill for this link. ]
“The tiny raw startup is the real locus of the Microsoft-Linux
showdown. Forget the desktop, forget the enterprise, forget the few
big content/commerce sites — it’s unclear whether Linux can win in
any of those segments, and in any case it doesn’t matter. The
important thing about Linux (and Open Source and the Web) is that
it shifts the balance of power back to the independent developers,
the underfunded experimental coolness-of-the-thing-itself
startup-type hackers…”
“But in August 1999, the Gartner Group released a study
claiming that the number of Windows-first developers is in the
middle of a sharp decline from 65% in 1998 to 40% in the year
2000. A quick flip through the job ads in bellwether Silicon
Valley shows more *nix than Windows development jobs, especially in
the hot new sectors. For the first time in a long time, the road to
software nirvana does not go directly through Redmond.”