why Unix?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> == Quote from Andrei Alexandrescu (SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org)'s article
>> At a company we were using MS Transaction Server. I went around and
>> asked my bosses why. Nobody knew. I asked what features of it we need.
>> Nobody knew, and they didn't knew even what the MTS was supposed to do.
>> The fact the company had bought it was a pure marketing trick from MS'
>> part. To continue the anecdote: my boss at the time woke up every
>> morning, came in early, checked out the new code - from Visual Source
>> Safe (another useless make-believe product that has never hold a candle
>> to even the, um, obsolete cvs that uses equally obsolete text files),
>> built it, deregistered each of a dozen objects from the graphical MTS
>> console, and then registered each again. This was the only known way to
>> make our updates work.
> 
> The registration aspect of MS programming technology has got to be about
> the most broken concept I've encountered in Windows.  It's abstruse, brittle,
> and incredibly error-prone.  In my brief exposure to .NET programming, this
> feature had me tearing my hair out more often than any other.

Yah, and the anecdote also illustrates the contempt that Windows has 
towards automation. Back then I didn't know any Unix, but I did have the 
intuition "it's a computer, so I'm supposed to have it do what I want... 
right?"

Speaking of which, due to my participation in MSR/UW symposia, I happen 
to know a tad more about MS' server technology than I care. I could 
summarize that in a thought: MS will have trouble getting on the Net 
where Google, Yahoo, or Amazon are, simply because they are constrained 
to using Windows. Even some internal big wigs acknowledge that. It would 
be terrible PR if they started using Unix technology, so they *have* to 
use Windows Server. IMHO they'll never get anywhere interesting with it.


Andrei