Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: the OS price

Author:Karl Fast
Posted:7/4/1999; 10:37:32 AM
Topic:scriptingNews outline for 7/2/99
Msg #:8170 (In response to 8167)
Prev/Next:8169 / 8171

Simplicity and reasonable performance are the real issues, not the monster kind of performance that the benchmarks test.

I was wondering if you'd say that. I'm glad you did. IMHO, scalability is important to relatively few administrators (of course it's important to all end users of the system). The people who run Yahoo and Amazon and the NY Times need scalability. But people who need this type of horspower are, at most, 25% of the web (and it's probably a lot less). We gotta stop talking about servers for the elite and dealing with real servers for the masses.

Sounds to me like you've been bitten by the cobalt cube.

What if you could drop a server onto your LAN and thru a web interface have a functioning mail, web, filesharing server, and every other kind of Internet standard server, in an attractive package for $1K?

Yup, you're smitten with the cube. Me too (at least, the idea of one since I've yet to touch one).

True story: a corporate intranet running a $100k HP/UX box with 512MB RAM and 16GB of UW SCSI hard drive space. Not a single CGI on the whole damned system and after 2.5 years they handle 400,000 hits a month on 4000 employees. And those are true hits, not page views. No CGI's, only a handful of SSI's, and everything static pages. Maybe I should send them a copy of the PC week study!

Isn't that scary? And I've seen this more than once. Where you are Dave, down in the valley, I doubt this happens much. But in my neck of the woods I see it all the time (granted, this company is dysfunctional, but corporate dysfunctionia is so common these days it almost seems normal).

NT can't participate in that market, with its current distribution options and pricing.

Not at the level we're talking about. At higher levels, like XOOM.COM as you mentioned, price is irrelevant. But for "the rest of us" NT can't compete very well for the reasons you mention. I completely agree with you here.

(we're doing a lot of back-patting here aren't we ;))

karl

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