Interesting article; I'm not going to look at the server side though, I think Microsoft servers sell because of Microsoft desktop products dominance in corporate IT.
I don't think it's entirely fair to say that Microsoft is the unrivalled king of the desktop - in the conservative world of corporate IT this is true, but for home use, Apple and Linux are both very popular now, while in specialised fields (graphic design, architecture) Apple seems to the preferred choice. Lastly, in science and manufacturing industry Unix and other, less well known platforms, remain very important if not very visible.
As for standards - the key reason for having Microsoft 'standard' desktops is always Office. Try exporting a Word document as anything useful on another platform... I had rather hoped that we would have seen emerging XML standards for basic documents by now.
(To be fair, I bought and use Microsoft's Office suite on my personal Apple laptop - and it's rather a nice port; pity this isn't an option on, say, Sun boxes I've worked on.)
Finally, I don't think there is a standard Windows desktop - is it NT? 98? 2000? XP? |
java.net RSS Feeds
