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Workstations: Unix losing to NT 136

Posted by Hemos from the turn-the-tide dept.
BadlandZ writes "CNN is carrying a SunWorld story that Unix lost in a big way to Windows NT last year. Which, seems to not include Linux, but my anti-Linux coworkers have already read it to say that it proves Unix is a dying dinosaur. " It's important to note that this is the workstation market-not actually the servers.
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Workstations: Unix losing to NT More

Workstations: Unix losing to NT

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  • Let's see what they have in the computer science department [msu.edu] at Michigan State University.

    Lots of suns, and a lab of SGIs. There are a few NT machines, but they tend to be down a lot, and are mostly used for word processing by the students who can't figure out Framemaker on the suns.
  • Let's see what they have in the Rest of the engineering department [msu.edu] at Michigan State University.

    They say 70+ UNIX systems, and 110+ PCs. NT is a little ahead.
  • Actually, I think most of the PCs listed on that page were running NT, even the old P90s. There are a few Linux machines around, but I don't think they are listen on any "Official" listings...
  • Hmmm, hasn't been rebooted, never crashed...

    Has it been off all this time? :-)
  • ...is that what's popular isn't necessarily what's right.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • They have been saying that Unix is dead for the last 30 years or so. One of the most popular arguments of NT advocates is "you'd better switch, cause NT is the future". Yeah, right. I bet in about 30 years, Unix will still be dying. And i'll still boot it up happily. Large numbers of NT users only show that the majority of people are idiots, and i allready knew that.

  • I assume, PCs with preinstalled Windows NT Workstation are counted as workstations, even though most of them are only upgrades for PCs that were running Windows 95. This gives nice statistics for Microsoft -- huge number of boxes that are used mostly as as typewriters moved from "PCs" with Windows 95 to "Workstations" class, however it doesn't change the fact that they still perform tasks of PC, not workstation.
  • Linux is not Unix. Linux is a Unix-like operating system. If they mention 'Unix' without mentioning Linux anywhere in an article from any reputable magazine, you can bet that Linux was not included.

    I wonder when the Linux clones will come out. "We are not Linux, we are Linux-like OS".
  • I have all the apps, games and (particularly) development tools I need here. And I've never paid a cent -- as contrasted to NT, where you pay in both time AND money.

    Hmm... which is better?...

  • Huh? (Score:1)

    by cduffy ( 652 )
    I _have_ installed gnome, and had it work well -- except I considered it ugly, and don't use it (or KDE).

    Regarding functionality, Unix beats out NT by far; I'd like to see your NT box (as my Linux box does) connect every evening to trusted FTP servers, download and install updated software. Or allow multiuser graphical connection without some buggy (and expensive) hackery.

    Go ahead, name something you can do on NT I can't do here.
  • ...has actually been made to run Office long 'nuff to get some screenshots.

    Anyhow, when you say "run Office", what is it you really want to do?

    To get a good word processor, a good spreadsheet, a database and a scheduler. All those are available natively (well, the native spreadsheets aren't as good imho).
  • Posted by Anhydrous Cowboy:

    That's a GOOD idea. NT users already have a system that must be set up and maintained by experts to remain useful -- why the hell should they give up Office and Solitaire for a struggling also-ran? To gratify your vanity and line your pockets?

    A friend of mine builds race cars, but he doesn't alienate everyone within earshot by telling them how stupid they are for not knowing everything about their engines in their piddly cheap-ass mass-produced cars. Hence, he sometimes gets dates. You might want to think about that.
  • Posted by Cornie:

    The Win95/98/NT/2000 and MacOS crowds are a whole different and separate tribe from UNIX, LINUX, VMS, Solaris, MVS, VM, MINIX, etc.

    LINUX will eventually replace UNIX as we know/knew it.
  • Yep. This is how it works for me.

    NT Workstation, okay.
    NT Server sucks.

    Linux server great (_when_ you get it setup)
    Linux workstation/desktop.....perhaps in a year or two.

    Horses for courses.
  • Yep. My esteemed institution also has a heap of NT Workstations(600+) tied with Workstation Manager to a huge array of Netware 4.11/5.0 boxes and a bunch of unix boxes for mail, etc. It all works quite nicely most of the time. The NT boxes certainly don't crash or bluescreen and they usually run for 2-3 months without a reboot.

    The unix workstations crash frequently(what do you expect from a Sun box)...have lousy performance considering they have had £20k spent on them...and the people who use them and "promote" their use are total stuck up snobs.

    I don't think anyone likes Microsoft's OS but when you bolt enough addons from Novell and have strategicly placed Linux based servers and have knowledgable support/config staff it does have an extremely high degree of utility.
  • ...people are switching to NT not because of belief in Microsoft, or a need to run win32 apps, but because of cost. Now that they can get Linux for cheaper, and now that (with Dell, HP preinstalling) they will be seen to do so by the statistics collectors, we can expect to see a huge swing our way.

    Poll: how long before Linux/FreeBSD preinstall sales overtake sales of whatever Microsoft's server end product is? Go on Rob, let's test our crystal balls.
    --

  • I've worked for a few companies that use expensive Unix hardware (AIX, Sun) just to run database clients. This is dumb and I wouldn't do it if it was my money. The hardware is just too expensive.

    Pointy haired people are clueing into the fact that you don't need MASSIVELY powerful workstations for this stuff and are buying Intel boxes. NT is by far the dominent operating system on Intel (Win98 doesn't count).

    The good news is that 1/ Linux is getting support from the database vendors that these shops use, 2/ Linux is more stable and cheaper, 3/ Sun/HP/IBM aren't stupid and will fight back as well.

    So I'm not worried about the long term trend. Finding Unix work won't be a problem for the forseeable future.

  • This is not all that suprising, for two reasons:

    1) Intel hardware has become quite powerful, but remains cheaper on average than custom hardware from Sun, HP, SGI, and others. So Intel hardware (regardless of the OS) is going to win on a cost basis in general. It is worth noting that recent offerings from Sun and SGI may help fix this.

    2) Once you have the Intel hardware, it is not too difficult to see why buyers might want to be able to run the same productivity software as the rest of the company (or why the buyers' IS folks might want them to). Microsoft Office is the 'standard' at many companies, and although there are alternatives to be had, they all have their price in minor incompatibilities.
  • They can only get away with claiming this because the client half of NT is called 'Workstation'. Hell, an overclocked 300A will run NT workstation, but that doesn't mean it's in the same league with an Ultra 5.

    If Apple renamed MacOS 8.5 'MacOS Workstation', the numbers against UNIX would get even bigger.

    That wouldn't mean anything. Neither does this.
  • With the imbending obsolence of DOS-based Windows, it comes as little surpise that sales of NT-installed PCs are on the upswing. With the introduction of W2K, I expect that this upswing will continue, as NT and 2K supplant 95 and 98, and get reclassified from PC's to Workstation's, and promptly inflate NT's presence in the workstation world.

    The Unix market is consolodating- and several of the smaller vendors are loosing out to NT (for instance, SCO). The interesting question is "what are the leaders- Sun, HP, and IBM- doing?"
  • The people with the brains will be using the Right Thing anyway. Unix ain't going away, sorry.
  • The numerous memory leaks present in stock Win95 should have killed the machine ages ago. Since no service packs could have been installed in the past 3 years, all of the old problems should still exist here.

    I don't buy it.
  • Cool. I submitted this article 2 days ago, with the comment that "Workstations are where the apps are."

    I really think that shipping workstations is much more important than shipping servers. Once people are comfortable with using an operating system, it is easy for them to strip it down and put it in a corner as a server. Servers, on the other hand, are often viewed as these mysterious boxes that only the sysadmin knows how to run, so why would I want that on my desk?

    The desktop is where most of the applications need to run. That means that most developers must learn how to program for the desktop OS. That means that if they need to develop for a server, they will have a strong bias toward using the same OS that they already know. It also means that whey they develope stuff for fun, they will develope for the desktop OS.

    This is critical folks. If Linux (or any version of Unix) fails to capture the desktop, it will ultimately fail to capture anything.

  • IMHO Educational institutions should do it the way UofM's Engineering Department did [umn.edu]. With an equal budjet, you could server far more users and/or provide better computing power to all users. (considering probably 9 out of 10 workstations usually carry a light load at most times anyway..... but even still....)
  • I read this article back when it was originally published and through it was kinda weird, especially for Sun World. I've noticed that most of their recent articles have been kinda strange.

    Just as a side note, while the (commercial) Unix workstation market isn't moving much, Sun themselves are doing great - they're getting 20-50% growth in workstation/server shipments. Co-incidentaly, or not, they're also the only ones 100% committed to Unix.

    Take them with a bit of a pinch of salt, but here's some recent figures from Sun about workstation [sun.com] and server growth [sun.com].

  • Wow, he must have never installed any new software. This windows box I'm on right now has been up... 2hrs (just got back from lunch...). Yesterday, due to spool32 errors this box rebooted more times than my Linux box has in a year.
  • I thought everybody knew about octree by now. They have binary packages for alot of Unix flavors, including Linux. It looks like it uses Mesa too. I downloaded it but haven't done anything with it yet. It's in beta right now, and they say they update it every 3 months.

    Anyway, it's at www.octree.de [octree.de]
  • Slashdot is supposed to provide "news for nerds", even if those nerds don't use Linux.

    If you want a Linux newsletter, there are plenty of other options - LWN and Linux Gazette come to mind.


    --
    Timur "too sexy for my code" Tabi, timur@tabi.org, http://www.tabi.org
  • The problem is that this is a traditional i386-NT vs sparc-Solaris or parisc-HP-UX comparison. Any such comparison that ignores i386-Linux is like comparing oranges and half-dollars. Look at them the right way and they're both round.
    -russ
  • This ties into the Dell/HP/Gateway etc. deals. Basically, as PC hardware has become more powerful, more and more companies have chosen PC-architecture machines as workstations. What OS are they going to run on them? NT, SCO, Linux, etc. But what can they but pre-installed, well, only NT.
    Now, with the new deals being announced (or rumoured) right and left, we can see this trend reverse itself. With Linux available pre-installed, and the PC architecture continuing to dominate the workstation market, we can claw back.
    --
  • I am not sure where all this is leading us, can't say that I care. Maybe we've been growing too fast and it's time for a bit of a backlash. But anyone who thinks statistics will stem the tide of free software just has their head screwed on backwards. In any case, VMS, MVS, Stratus etc are all still alive and serving, who cares, back to code.
  • So what if that were true. My linux system is more useful every day. (anyone notice how blazing fast the 2.2.0 kernel is?)

    Let the rest of the moronic world bust its head dealing with NT.
  • From my own experience, I worked at companies moving to NT (from VMS) and had friends who's companies move to NT from SGI boxen. It doesn't
    suprise me that there are "numbers" to back this up.

    However, M$ has peaked in 1997(that's right). We
    are seeing the software empire in their "red giant" phaze. You'll see Linux making BIG MOVES this year and into next. I can smell the Redmont's sweat from hear.

    Again, the important thing is to concentrate on improving Linux, not beating M$, who has already lost the game anyway.

    Linux on the Desktop? It could happen. As the X desktops become more PHB friendly, greater erosion of NT will occur. It will anyway. Where to you want to go Jan 1, 2000?

    As far away from an NT shop as possible. :)

  • How many of those workstations are actually running Windows NT? The numbers are based on the number of copies of Windows NT "sold", and I don't know exactly how widespread this is, but I personally have purchased and set up more than a dozen machines in the past year that came (unasked) with Windows NT but are now running Linux.

    It's very easy to boost your numbers if you ship heaps of software to people that haven't ordered it. By that measure AOL's software has probably outstripped Netscape and Microsoft combined!
  • I'm programming under Linux even when I'm making software for NT because I'm making Java servlets and because under Linux my work is faster and better and above all I have good feeling from my work. NT is maybe user friendly, but not to me as I'm not common MS customer. Windows makes me angry realy fast even when I'm trying not to get angry. Windows are for idiots and I'm not feeling like one (at leas in computer are - if someone want to argue with me about that :) and idiots and idiot-things in action makes me angry.

    And I'm still wondering why are people risking theire valueable work using Windows (risk: Word crash, Windows crash, other user make mistake and delete everything, ...). For animated cursors? Using Windows is like driving nice car through nice country on nice road but with deadly collision every few kilometers/miles.

  • my 2p's worth:

    I work for a company that for "nuclear safety issues" would rather use OS/2 and Lan Server or Win NT than anything else...

    We have a SPARC workstation for certain jobs, and upgraded to Slolaris 2.6 a while back. We needed a new key for some graph-plotting software that we had (bear in mind they will not use Free Software because "it's Shareware and all Shareware has viruses") since we'd chaned the OS version, and they wanted to charge us 600 UKP!

    NT software doesn't have such restrictions, does it?

    Just a thought.
  • Love it!
  • A few years ago, it was a quite clear: a Work Station is a powerful personal computer that does not run MS-DOS, Windows or MacOS. That's to say, it would run Unix or VMS.
    Now, they started calling big PCs workstation. Hence commenting on the growing market size of NT in the workstation market does not make _any_ sense ...
  • Have you ever sat down and looked at a NT Workstation and then looked at an NT Server? Well incase you haven't there is so little between them that it is amazing that the price difference is so large. I Only a company like Microsoft will take a product, cripple it and sell the full version for a much higher price. It is so funny that is sad. I remember a while ago someone came up with a way to convert a NT Workstation into an NT Server, somehow the information disappared off of the internet. Go figure.
  • Raw numbers like that are absolutely ridiculous. How many NT servers does it take to do the work of a high end Sun server? They can't convert the hotmail service over to NT because it's too hard, and the cost would be ridiculous. Of course revenues for NT servers are higher...they're cheap, but not that cheap. And when you need to sell in a 10-1 ratio to get the glorified workstations that NT servers are, the statistics are on your side.

  • Depending on how you define "workstation", I can see how NT is beating Unix. Architects and engineers use "workstations" -- defined as bigger, badder, faster than your standard box -- and they overwhelmingly use AutoCAD, which is Win32 only. There are a *lot* of architects, engineers, contractors, specifiers, etc. out there.

    Kinda sad that there isn't an AEC package for Linux (yet). It would do gangbuster business. An ironclad Unix app beats a fru-fru, half-assed 95/98/NT app any day.

    An open source drafting program that incorporates the OpenDWG [opendwg.org] movement would reverse this NT "workstation" trend, IMHO.

    Even better, if the CAD package would read and understand the current AutoLISP tools that people have spent so much time and money on, with the stability and power advantage of Unix, AutoCAD would have very little to stand on.

    Just my opinion....

  • I seem to recall another article (quoting IDC figures) which said that NT's market growth was (somewhat perversely) due to its inability to scale. Essentially, NT shops had to put in several single-function NT servers (eg. a print server, a mail server, a web server, etc.) where previously a single Unix server would've been used.

    Under that scenario, where's the cost savings? Sure, you paid less per box, but you ended up buying alot more boxes.

  • What's the differnece between a work station and a desktop? Or as the article says a "high end desktop". A rose by any other name and all that...
  • Look at the figures for who shipped the most workstations. 37% of them were shipped by HP and Dell. These two giants are in the process of rolling out Linux-installed products where they have previously only shipped NT workstations.

    Maybe that will have an impact on the statistics next time round...
  • Workstations are historically used by engineers and product developers, who generally have need for higher end machines than regular end users. I have a feeling that they are counting high-end PC's that are used for desktop purposes such as bosses reading their email.. or MSWord.. whatever.

    If you don't really find out what is being done with the machine, you can't really qualify it as being a server/workstation/desktop
  • Ya gotta wonder about how they decide a given
    NT box is a "workstation". I submit that any
    computer with NT on it can't be a workstation.
  • When Apple ships it's NeXT/BSD-based OS X, I wonder how that would effect those numbers? They do ship ALOT of machines! I would consider them a "Workstation Vendor" then, since they will have a UNIX-based OS and seem to devote all of their energies on the high-end graphics market. Can you imagine an instant shot in the arm for the UNIX market when Apple announces shipping 800,000 iMacs with OS 10?

    -Sol

  • ....he should write an article on how he got a Packard Bell to run for more than a year :)
  • Look at the dynamic here. More companies are going to the intel/NT option because it is cheaper than a commercial unix workstation. Bottom line, you can buy more for less. This has nothing to do with performance or stability, just bottom line. Even if support costs are higher, that is probably a differnt budget. This is an equation where linux runs rings around NT or any of the commercial unix offerings. I look forward to seeing what these numbers will be in a year to 18 months. this is a game where linux stands to win and win big.
  • I've always felt that the strength of Linux lies in the server as opposed to the desktop. I think by prematurely pushing it as an alternative to WinXX on the desktop it is hurting the cause (ie: "use Linux?...my friend could never get it running").

    Make Linux strong in the server market and the desktop will follow...when it's ready for your average joe. AC

  • At this point you are exactly right. As a workstation NT beats Linux any time...
    Hopefully, it will change .. will see
  • Actually, for a while at work I was forced to use an NT box. Thankfully it had Exceed installed on it. I telneted to my Linux box, then ran an xterm remotely. Shortly thereafter, I had a productive environment. Of course, the only app that was being executed on my local CPU was exceed, and notepad (for an unrelated job). NT didn't make a terrible dumb X terminal. Pretty bad in some regards, though. It captures a lot of useful keystrokes. Then I think that it crashed on me later that day while in the screensaver (default NT screensaver). Frankly, what can you do on an NT only box besides send some email and browse the web?
  • He can natively run Visual Basic programs. Aside from that... well... um... He can natively run word and generate 1 meg documents that can be converted to 100k html documents (pictures included in both)... hm. I would say that he could pay lots of money to get actual functionality, but you could do the same thing if you wanted to, there are people who make commercial compilers for Linux. Of course, there's no reason to do so under Linux, what comes with the box is pretty good... Ah, he can pay for Bill Gates House! :-)
  • I don't think that anyone is going to claim that Linux has more installs than NT. The article wasn't even about Linux, it was about UNIX, from what I have gathered, but I didn't read the article so I won't push that one.
    As a number of people have said, this doesn't really mean anything, anyhow. Linux is picking up momentum, and fast. Maybe it won't happen this year, or next year, but things are moving along fast.
    Also, about your sig, what JWZ said was true. The thing is, NT costs more in terms of purchasing and in terms of getting it to do what you want. NT can sometimes work to do what other people want, sometimes. It lacks scripting, it lacks remote display, it lacks a good command line, it lacks a good programming environment (well, I should qualify that. I've only ever used Visual C++ 1.0. Subsequent versions really looked like they suck, but either way, programming windows is painful. And Why are so many fields in structures "reserved", but their value matters? Anyhow, NT doesn't come with any development environment, unless you call those truly pathetic DOS batch files a development environment), it lacks configurability, it lacks virtual desktops, and whole bunch of other things. Have you ever tried getting real work done on an NT box? It can be done, sometimes. Often I end up just ended up wrestling with the damn thing. And it's networking is so slow. If you are connected to anything of a complex network, just getting to a file on your own box can take 30 seconds or more, and that's just finding the thing. There is no good way to access an NT box remotely, let alone get any work done that way. I have yet to run across a job that took even the same amount of time under NT than under Linux, except browsing the web. Maybe email, though I have done my best to avoid that under NT. Yes, Linux costs you time, NT costs you a lot more time. And when the damn box crashed seven times in 6 days, often at the screen saver, that's way too much time in terms of getting my evnironment set up for maximum productivity. Oh, and did I mention that NT has no good, reliable way of shutting down apps that are frozen? Sometimes I had to do the ctl-alt-delete kill app thing five or six times, sometimes more. And why are the window control buttons (minimize, etc.) part of the app? WHy is it that when the app freezes, you can't even minimize it? And how do you send process a SIGHUP, to get ones that are geared to it to re-read their config files so that you don't have to reboot. Come to think of it, how do you change your IP address without rebooting?
    Just a closing though: "The idea that an arbitrary naive human should be able to properly use a given
    tool without training or understanding is even more wrong for computing than it is for other tools (e.g. automobiles, airplanes, guns, power saws)." -- Doug Gwyn
  • The article said 776,000 "branded" NT workstations vs. 599,000 Unix workstations. 1.3M in all. How many new installations of Linux and *BSD happened last year?

    As an aside, there's no reason NT can't be used for most of the tasks engineering workstations have been traditionally used for.

  • Heh, the excuses so far have been hilarious! Man, the truth must hurt pretty bad to see some of you guys trying so hard to spin this into a positive. I especially loved the one about "If you build a great server platform, the desktop apps will follow." Where's he been living the past 20 years, Bizarro World? Good work, boys!

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

    "Linux is only free if your time has no value" -- JWZ, mozilla.org

  • I mean, Hell, I actually use Linux, but it's just amazing to hear the delusionment that's afflicted the vocal majority of their supporters. I hear so many things that just fly in the face of what's going on in the real world, it's not even funny. It's so much to the point of a joke that many times I rarely mention that I use Linux unless I'm pressed because it's embarrassing to be associated with the typical image of a Linux user. Totally reminds me of what happened to the JavaLobby, 'though that might've been worse. Uh yeah, like I want Eric Raymond or Rick Ross to speak for me.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

    "Linux is only free if your time has no value" -- JWZ, mozilla.org

  • sometimes I tend to agree that being associated with the "typical image of a Linux user" is a little embarrasing, but then I think: no, this is the typical image of a *slashdot anonymous coward*.
    I dunno, I see it as more of a slashdot user thing, than an AC thing, with the ACs looking to inflame, but some of the non-anonymous posters saying just as much nonsense but actually believing it. Not to say that my own original post wasn't a bit troll-y: I think if I had been the first poster, the tone would've been a lot nicer. After wading through a lot of what were IMO some very out-there ideas, I was ready to grab somebody by the lapels and snap them out of it.

    As for the JavaLobby, I'm probably still listed as a member, but I don't consider myself part of it anymore -- I'm just not using Java that much. What would get me annoyed, though, was Rick's going to media outlets and then me reading about it later, presented as if every single member backed up Rick's views. Maybe it was just bad reporting, but it still grated. I had joined very early on, before it got political, but once it did, it ruined it for me. Any veneer of professionalism went out of it and the forums became more like alt.destroy.microsoft than anything actually useful to a developer. I'm sure that anyone who joins now knows what they're getting, but back in the beginning, a good many didn't.

    As for Eric Raymond, I can't share your admiration. I think he's most interested in stroking his own ego. And the reason for my Raymond-Ross comparison had to do with me signing up for the JavaLobby, then being saddled with Ross's petty media bullshit by proxy, just as some people, especially the media, take Raymond's statements to be some sort of gospel representing Linux users everywhere. What I don't like is my guilt by association with what I deem as two unsavory characters. Out of your list, I'd say I hold Larry Wall in much higher esteem than any of the other people. Maybe it's just because I know less about him as a person than the rest, which has something to do with the ones that I dislike. Hmmm... Oh well, whether there's a deeper reason behind it or not, there's always been something about his attitude that I've admired.

    Anyway, not to disparage your JavaLobby membership -- like I said, it's been a long time since I was active, so it (and Rick) might be completely different now for all I know.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

    "Linux is only free if your time has no value" -- JWZ, mozilla.org

  • I wonder what will happen to those #s with the continual delay of "Windows 2000" -- from what I've heard, it looks like it won't be released until next year sometime (2-3 years late), which could be a problem since WinNT4 doesn't seem to be completely Y2K compliant.

    Chances for Linux or MacOSX?

    Hmmmm...

    =moJ
    - - - - - -
    Member in Good Standing,

  • Win NT is basically Win 9x with a better kernel. The API is very similar. Being this as it is, does any real tech believe that NT is better than UNIX? It is so obvious that NT is little more than a desktop operating system. Sure, managers might love it now, but when it starts costing them more than they had planned, in both downtime and money, they will re-evaluate. The one nice thing about NT, is that it has brought the UNIX market together, and increased efforts to make Unix more usable to the every day user. NT is the disease that wont kill us, but only make us stronger. If it hadn't been for the percieved threat of NT, Unix might be more fragmented than it is today. Thanks billy boy :)
  • I work for a shop that ports VMS apps to Unix and NT, and I can tell you from experience that Unix of any flavor is easier to port to than NT, and much more stable. Many of our customers initially ask for NT ports, and then change their minds when they see the problems involved. The concensous among our customers is that NT can't do the job, and never will.
  • 1. NT is supposedly based on VMS
    2. VMS was once poised to threaten Unix, back in the seventies and early eighties
    3. VMS outgrew Unix for a short time
    4. VMS was proprietary to DEC
    5. Win NT is proprietary to MS
    6. DEC and VMS are dead
    7. History repeats itself :)
  • True, I do agree that NT has its uses, and does these fairly well. The point I was trying to stress is that it is not an enterprise class server operating system. It is really only an enterprise class desktop PC system. Like you say, it makes a decent file server, and it does have a few other good uses. However, at 1000+ plus support costs and hardware requirements, it is overpriced, and with a little effort, Linux systems can do the same for much less money, and hardware. Linux does have a ways to go before it is as easy to administer, but that time will come, and then NT will have to compete on a different level, one that it does not yet posses.
  • I was annoyed when my company replaced unix workstations with NT workstations, but NT workstations are generallly cheaper.

    Give it a bit of time and companies will realise they can have reliable unix workstations on cheap x86 hardware by running linux (etc)
  • Um.. doesn't this only measure the number of workstations with *preinstalled* Windows NT? Our department got a whole cluster of workstation machines that were prebuilt with NT, but they have now been removed from the Collective! Since almost *all* workstations by major manufacturers come with NT, ... does this article mention how many of these NT pc's have their Microcruft implants removed? ... my guess is a big-time NO.
  • Who cares? The more people out there who limp along on NT, the better my company runs in competition.

    Remember: If everyone were as smart as us, we'd only be making minimum wage.
  • I've had salesmen tell me lots of whoppers. None beat that one, though.

  • The main thing is that Gates is getting away with stuff. He ripped off Apple for Windows (and, therefore, Xerox PARC who came up with the whole GUI thing). He didn't write MS-DOS, the only OS he has ever had which was stable. He didn't even write Microsoft WORD -- that was bought from a consultant. But he's a Wily Coyote who is getting off with it. Why is he getting over on Linux and UNIX in general? (N.B. I'm running FreeBSD as I write this) The bottom line is that computers remain obscure and arcane. People are scared of them, of anything unfamiliar in general. So Gates is running a Herd Mentality operation. If it is big, it must be good. WE know this is not true, but with all UNIX flavors being as obscure as they are to operate, we are not the OS flavor that will stop the Microsoft Megalith.

    It is also time to complain about something serious with all "major" OSes, Gates included. Any of them may roach your hard disk if you get a power hit. Really, people, this is not tolerable. I just lost FreeBSD yesterday because a contractor stopping by to do some work on an outside wall, finding he had to drill into it, flipped off the wrong circuit breaker and down went the power. UNIX is arcane enough that it's faster to reinstall (assuming that recovery is even possible) than it is to fix it all up.

    If you had to put a new engine in your car every time it ran out of gas, cars would never have replaced horses. What puzzles me, all things considered, is how much of this people have put up with already.
  • ...any poor sod who buys MS Visual C++ gets a copy of Windows NT Workstation packaged with it! And you can bet your ass that these copies were counted towards the aforementioned statistics.
  • All this article has is sales of NT workstation,
    doesn't mean they didn't install Linux after they got it

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