[TriLUG] Linux for the desktop

[James Manning]

> What the hell. MS should port Windows to Linux.  They should get out
> the OS business anyway.

Don't kid yourself, RH may not be the only company semi-abandoning the
regular consumer.  I don't think it's a made decision, but as many
others have pointed out, MS makes way more money on a copy of Office
than it does XP Home.

Much like Oracle's (by some accounts failed) attempt, Microsoft will
strength their focus on the application space.  The OS isn't going to
go away, but they're going to see some huge gains from being able to
maintain single code bases for various products (and much smaller code
bases with their MS Business Framework that abstracts a ton of things
they were doing cross-application - consider it to be a lot like
Apache Jakarta Commons) across multiple platforms (Windows and OSX
alone will be worth it - oh, and look, a chunk of other platforms
become possible too).  IIRC, it's called their "Green" project or
something like that.  The savings to MS for their own application
development will be huge, but the real gains are the ones that can
happen at ISV's where those same gains in efficiency can be realized.

MS realizes what Java did for cross-platform and their not blind to
it, but they'll of course have to focus on Windows both for being the
dominant OS at the moment and because it's their own dog food.

Honestly, this is why I'm with Miguel on the possibilities of the Mono
project and .NET as a framework - it's not that MS is leading the
charge (honestly, I'm indifferent to it being their project to start
with), but it gives me all the cross-platform power (potentially,
we're certainly not "quite" there yet) without typing me to a
language.

And to be fair, there were efforts that targeted other languages to
the Java bytecodes/VM, but they never seemed to mature.  And that can
certainly happen with .NET as well.  The goal is "any language(s), any
OS, one code base".  Java started with "part 2" of that, .NET is
starting with "part 1", but both have to fill in the other part to
achieve the goal.  I'm just wishing Mono the best of luck :)

Wow, sorry, didn't mean for this to ramble so long :)

James
-- 
James Manning <http://www.sublogic.com/james/>
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