The Operating System they use in Heaven...

I don't know quite how mind associations work. People have modeled the brain as a huge associative memory with billions of processors, variously interconnected such that the topography of the links between processors represent concepts, and the reduction in strength of these links represents loss of memory with the passage of time.

Those of you who know the Welsh comedian, Max Boyce, would be aware of his description of rugby as "the game they play in heaven!". No-one but the most ardent AFL fans would dare dispute this, of course... although the recent form of the Welsh rugby team may well have caused Max to change his tune - if not his religion!

Somehow the presence of both the Pope and Bill Gates in Sydney at the same time recently conjured up the phrase in my mind: "UNIX - the operating system they use in heaven"! Again, very few people - other than the uninformed and perhaps a few VMS die-hards who still retain that incredible ability to pronounce file names with '$' characters in the middle of them - would dispute this.

All except for Mr. Gates, that is! I know for a fact that Bill Gates is not a VMS zealot, and no-one could possibly call him uninformed. So why does he insist in thrusting his own operating system on the world that, by and large, the IT community does not need nor want?

It set me off thinking about Microsoft in the wider context. We actually know why Microsoft is spurning the "Operating System they use in Heaven" in favour of their own home-cooked alternative: it's all to do with the bottom line. In the world of commodity purchasing, it is the best selling product (or technology) that eventually becomes the standard, purely by market forces. The organisation whose technology dominates the commodity market stands to gain healthy royalty revenues and so forth.

That Microsoft has cornered the desktop market cannot be denied, although IBM and Apple are still plugging away with their own desktop environments. Even this writer has succumbed and is penning these few thoughts in a Windows environment...

In the non-desktop arena - generally referred to as the midrange market - Microsoft has to date been a non-player, but they have designs on this area with NT - under its various code names. This is the area where UNIX is firmly entrenched, and every single computer manufacturer now offers UNIX. It is a non-issue: UNIX will not be moved from its position of dominance of the midrange. I honestly believe that Microsoft have left their run too late.

Let's face it, the midrange is the database market. It is the 'server' side of client/server technology. Microsoft has reached a position of dominance at the desktop (i.e. client side) by owning both the operating environment and the desktop application software market - or at least a healthy proportion of it. Again, this writer will admit to being a user of Word - and quite a satisfied one at that!

Who are the dominant players in the server market? Certainly all the database vendors are there. In fact, if you ignored the database vendors, there really wouldn't be a server market at all! Databases such as Oracle, Sybase, Informix, Ingres and so forth are not tied to any particular operating environment - thanks to Open Systems (read: UNIX). This is the world where standards do matter: users want the freedom to be able to change their hardware if they wish. Changing form vendor A to vendor B is a relatively painless task if the implementation has been on UNIX. As an aside, changing an application from one relational database to another is a different matter: even though they are all SQL based, they all have enough attractive proprietary extensions to make portability a major problem.

Microsoft are not only at loggerheads with the rest of the IT industry in the server environment area - they are trying to establish their own proprietary standards on the market place in other areas as well. One such area is Objects. Everyone (even Microsoft) agrees that having a set of software 'objects' that can be used over and over again in different programs would be a good thing. Virtually the rest of the IT world have thrown their support behind the Object Management Group's definition of reusable 'objects', the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Our colleagues at Microsoft, however, have their own object description -OLE - which they are trying to make a standard purely by market forces. And before I get calls from Microsoft lawyers, let me point out that I am quoting from learned journals such as IEEE Computer, and Object Magazine...

We can all do our bit, of course, to level the playing field by sticking to both UNIX and the wider concepts of Open Systems that UNIX has spawned - even Microsoft could not hold out against TCP/IP, which after all is the standard communications software on UNIX.

Is UNIX the operating system they use in heaven? You bet!