“InfoWorld: Right now, the majority of dot-coms
and ISVs seem to be leaning toward Linux and Solaris. How will
Windows 2000 change their minds?”
Allchin: Linux is this ‘handyman’s special’
operating system. You can tinker with it, and maybe the house won’t
be so straight when you’re done but it feels good pounding the
nails in when you’re building it. For small and maybe even embedded
systems, it’s a system that is competitive. I think that there’s
nothing in Linux in the e-commerce space if you’re going to run a
reasonable-size business on it that somebody’s going to consider
it….”
“InfoWorld: Some of your competitors would
argue that there’s so much going into the OS, any one piece that
breaks will have a disastrous effect across the board, and that
putting everything into the operating system is inherently a bad
design.
Allchin: And if you didn’t have all of the
technology we have, what would you say? Exactly what they’re
saying. Of course the system’s modular. Linux is a 30-year-old
architecture. [It doesn’t] even have asynchronous I/O, for
heaven’s sake. [Its] SMP [symmetric multiprocessing] is terrible.
It’s not about being modular; this is about integration and
making it easier for customers. I’m a hard-core believer that by
integrating things together, things get simpler.”