James Bond
12-31-2000, 08:47 PM
This is my opinions on the article as it appeared on theregister -- http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/15708.html
Let us think about this for a moment. And then, I will try to argue as to why I think it will never happen.
#1 -- the ideas presented about .NET say that MS will soon be relying on all of the ISP's out there to provide reliable service to their sites. Let's look at AOL, it sucks, but, has 8? million users. AOL cannot supply the bandwidth to all of those users if they try to connect to .NET, in fact, i dont' think the internet itself can handle the ammount of traffic that would be sent to the .NET servers if these machine had to run everything for millions of users. Modems would be totally obsolete b/c everyone would need a cable or faster to get the needed speed. Let alone the processing power that MS would need, I doubt that these ideas are feasable anytime soon.
#2 -- No matter how much I love a company (by the way, I hate MS), I would never trust them to run all of my mission critical data, especially if I cannot even maintain a copy of it myself without getting charged. This does not make buisness sence on the consumer end. Thus, if consumers don't want it and won't pay for it, I doubt that MS will produce it. Remember they are all about $.
#3 -- Hard drives. On both ends. The consumer market will bottom out. Many HD makers will go belly up. Only internet providers/servers and .NET will need any, and they will only need high end drives at that. Another feasability point is the ammount of drives that MS itself will have to have. Think about it, they will need to store all of everybody's data, and probably multiple copies of it. That means that they will need huge ammounts of drive space. Terrabytes and terrabytes. Imagine when they have to defragment (since WinNT will be the most likely OS for the servers, and NTFS gets horribly fragmented during normal use, just image how often these servers will have to go down for defragmenting).
#4 -- Haven't we seen this before? I am a college student, so, I haven't worked with all of the legacy stuff that many people out there have worked with, but, wasn't a simmilar concept to this used in the 60's and 70's called timesharing? where everyone had a dumb terminal and connected to a mainframe? Didn't that get killed by the PC? Wasn't it MS and the PC that killed it?
In short, for the time being, .NET is not feasible on either the client nor the server end. People have grown too comfortable with the idea of owning a PC and purchasing, not renting, their software. People like to pirate. What will happen to the MP3's? Will they die as well, or will MS make them illegal? Perhaps .NET will work for internet appliances, but, I seriously doubt that many other people will want to join, and will find other options. Perhaps .NET will be the death of MS.
Just remember, MS is all about the money. They have invested a lot of PR into .NET, so, we can all be sure that it will happen. The form it will take is the biggest question right now.
There are too many other options to the .NET for everyone to join. What about the Linux/BSD people, the SUN users, the Mac addicts, they will all still use their computers the way they use them now.
Please feel free to comment, I would appreciate the input.
-James
PS - I love linux, I use Linux, MacOS9, Win98/ME and Win2K reguarly. They each have their place for me to get done what needs to get done. I have nothing but contempt for MS, I just wrote this article b/c I am long winded and felt like the writer on theregister was way too biased and they tried to create news from rumours.
PPS - I am a horrible speller and did not spell check this at all, sorry.
Let us think about this for a moment. And then, I will try to argue as to why I think it will never happen.
#1 -- the ideas presented about .NET say that MS will soon be relying on all of the ISP's out there to provide reliable service to their sites. Let's look at AOL, it sucks, but, has 8? million users. AOL cannot supply the bandwidth to all of those users if they try to connect to .NET, in fact, i dont' think the internet itself can handle the ammount of traffic that would be sent to the .NET servers if these machine had to run everything for millions of users. Modems would be totally obsolete b/c everyone would need a cable or faster to get the needed speed. Let alone the processing power that MS would need, I doubt that these ideas are feasable anytime soon.
#2 -- No matter how much I love a company (by the way, I hate MS), I would never trust them to run all of my mission critical data, especially if I cannot even maintain a copy of it myself without getting charged. This does not make buisness sence on the consumer end. Thus, if consumers don't want it and won't pay for it, I doubt that MS will produce it. Remember they are all about $.
#3 -- Hard drives. On both ends. The consumer market will bottom out. Many HD makers will go belly up. Only internet providers/servers and .NET will need any, and they will only need high end drives at that. Another feasability point is the ammount of drives that MS itself will have to have. Think about it, they will need to store all of everybody's data, and probably multiple copies of it. That means that they will need huge ammounts of drive space. Terrabytes and terrabytes. Imagine when they have to defragment (since WinNT will be the most likely OS for the servers, and NTFS gets horribly fragmented during normal use, just image how often these servers will have to go down for defragmenting).
#4 -- Haven't we seen this before? I am a college student, so, I haven't worked with all of the legacy stuff that many people out there have worked with, but, wasn't a simmilar concept to this used in the 60's and 70's called timesharing? where everyone had a dumb terminal and connected to a mainframe? Didn't that get killed by the PC? Wasn't it MS and the PC that killed it?
In short, for the time being, .NET is not feasible on either the client nor the server end. People have grown too comfortable with the idea of owning a PC and purchasing, not renting, their software. People like to pirate. What will happen to the MP3's? Will they die as well, or will MS make them illegal? Perhaps .NET will work for internet appliances, but, I seriously doubt that many other people will want to join, and will find other options. Perhaps .NET will be the death of MS.
Just remember, MS is all about the money. They have invested a lot of PR into .NET, so, we can all be sure that it will happen. The form it will take is the biggest question right now.
There are too many other options to the .NET for everyone to join. What about the Linux/BSD people, the SUN users, the Mac addicts, they will all still use their computers the way they use them now.
Please feel free to comment, I would appreciate the input.
-James
PS - I love linux, I use Linux, MacOS9, Win98/ME and Win2K reguarly. They each have their place for me to get done what needs to get done. I have nothing but contempt for MS, I just wrote this article b/c I am long winded and felt like the writer on theregister was way too biased and they tried to create news from rumours.
PPS - I am a horrible speller and did not spell check this at all, sorry.