“There’s been a lot of press recently concerning Microsoft’s
recent presentation of its web site. By coincidence, and to
right the wrong expressed by Microsoft that ‘Linux Needs Real World
Proof Points’, Bloor Research published today the results of its
operational comparison between Linux and Windows NT.”
“Clearly the Windows NT – versus – Linux debate will run on and
on, particularly with the launch of Windows 2000, which will see a
significant number of additional features to the operating system
(not least its ability to be reconfigured without being rebooted,
which has long been the bane of NT systems administrators). Linux
remains, above all else, free and capable of supporting a wide
range of uses, although it is clearly not suitable for
everything.”
“Five years ago there was the NT versus Unix debate, which the
Unix community appeared to be losing until Microsoft attempted to
tackle the issue of enterprise scalability and convinced no-one.
This gave the end users a new set of perspectives, that it was OK
to use the right operating system for the job and that the concept
of a single OS which could run on the smallest device up to the
largest server was inappropriate, not to say unachievable. These
perspectives hold true today: NT is suitable for a variety of
tasks, but remains inadequate for a whole set of others.”