Thanks to Doug
Bostrom for this link.
“Recently, I attended the first eBusines Expo show, in San Jose,
CA. I was invited to speak on a panel to discuss ‘Platforms of the
Future–Which will Win and Why’. Besides me, the panel included the
president of a company that sells systems preconfigured with Linux,
a Microsoft product manager, and a vice president from a large
consulting firm that supports NT, Linux, and other
systems–basically whatever the company wants. It turned out to be
an interesting experience.”
“Early in the session, our Linux panelist asked for a show of
hands: How many people in the room were running Linux? It turned
out to be a respectable 10% or so. He expanded on that to ask how
many people were planning to look at it, interested in it, and got
that up to maybe a third of the hands in the room. When my turn
came, I thought it might be nice to expand that to other operating
systems, so I asked for a show of hands of people running NT.
Almost every hand in the room went up (including some, though
certainly not all, of the people running Linux)! I asked how many
people had gotten a look at Win2000 beta-3, and got a similar
response to the number of folks who said they were running Linux.
That left me a mite curious, so I asked for a show of hands of how
many people were running something other than NT or Linux.”