Date: Mon, 26 Dec 2005 03:04:26 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "dick hoogendijk" <dick@nagual.st>, "freebsd-questions" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: BSD Question's. Message-ID: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNEECAFDAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20051225135429.GA26359@lothlorien.nagual.st>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of dick hoogendijk >Sent: Sunday, December 25, 2005 5:54 AM >To: freebsd-questions >Subject: Re: BSD Question's. > > >On 24 Dec Danial Thom wrote: >> Schwab Streetsmart >> Accounting Software (CA) >> Quicken >> Photoshop >> Adobe Acrobat (for creating PDFs) >> >> Those are the ones I use daily. Surely there are >> some half-assed alternatives for some of these, >> but if I have to use something inferior to use >> FreeBSD then thats a point against it. > >NO. It's not a point against the OS. It merely demonstrates why lots of >people stay with windows. NOT because the OS is better, but its support >by *third party soft-hardware* is better. > >Windows itself (the OS) is worse than FreeBSD (imho). Those 3th party >people are responsable for the leading role of microsoft. >Not MS itself. > No, not really. It's circumstances that are responsible for the leading role of Microsoft. Remember, Windows still has DOS in it, and DOS is about 10 years older than FreeBSD. Microsoft got a big head start at the right time. I wouldn't worry about it, though. Truth is that the computer market has fundamentally changed. It's now a market that caters to the unwashed masses, and such markets naturally fall into either a monopoly, or a level of standardization that there's minor product differentiation between the leaders, so they may as well be a monopoly. Take the automobile market, fundamentally most passenger vehicles look and act the same, burn the same fuel, use the same tires/batteries/ etc. and cost the same. Same with the soft drink market, same with the cell phone market, etc. etc. In order for UNIX to become the dominant OS it would have to change to be almost exactly like Windows, and would certainly have to be completely compatible, able to run Windows binaries out of the box, etc. OS/2 was like this at one time, if you remember. You would end up with 2 similar operating systems, one made by Microsoft the other made by RedHat (or whoever) and essentially the same thing. If Digital Research had caught on early enough, we would have had DOS and DR-DOS pretty much equivalent markets. That would have ended up with equivalent Windows 3.1's and later Windows 95's. We really are better off with UNIX in the minority, that gives it a freedom to explore new ideas that Windows lacks. It's no surprise that most of the eye candy in Windows today was ripped off of various X window managers. Ted
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNEECAFDAA.tedm>