Most of the information you get out of Redmond about their products is full of marketing fluff and rarely honest about potential deficits. It is uncommon that you hear a Microsoft employee say that anything about Unix or Linux is better than Windows. Here's an interview detailing some of the issues that have been dealt with and some that are still on the back-burner for Windows 2003 Server [ZDNet]. I think Microsoft's efforts in the last couple of years is clear proof of the validity of competition in the marketplace. Of course, Linux isn't about making money, but the presence of Linux on the market has forced Microsoft to make some important changes and to look at issues that they might have otherwise overlooked.

Why is there no command line only version?
We're looking longer term to see what can be done, looking at the layers and what's available at each layer and how do we make it much closer to the thing the Linux guys have -- having only the pieces you want running. That's something Linux has that's ahead of us, but we're looking at it. We will have a command line-only version, but whether it'll have all the features in is another matter. A lot of the tools depend on having the graphical interface. Printing, for example, requires all the graphics subsystems because we have the "what you see is what you get" model. You need to have the whole of the display stuff to render it. It's a very tangled subsystem.

There are some interesting trends developing that could change the interaction between Linux and Windows. First, Windows is getting more and more stable. Second, remote administration of Windows has improved dramatically. Terminal Services is a big improvement over PC Anywhere or VNC. It is much cleaner and smoother.

However, two big areas that I think the Windows team really needs to work on is a) the command line interface and b) the scripting environment. Of course these two things are closely linked. More command line utilities makes scripting much easier. Add to that a more robust scripting language and Windows could become appealing in places where Linux would currently be the defacto choice.

I use Windows and Linux in my work, but when I can I always use Linux. I don't see this changing anytime soon, but it is way too early to dismiss Microsoft. They have a lot of brainpower working on the problem and the more Linux eats into their marketshare, the more Microsoft will strive to make Windows competitive. 10:58:07 AM    comment []