Patrick Wellink

# re: One advantage of MS over Open Source

I think most of us will agree that Microsoft has made great improvements on the quality of their products over the last years.
I must admit that in the past I was very sceptical of MS products.
But with the release of W2K and the .NET platform, it's clear MS has made big steps towards a credible partner for enterprise solutions.

And the world agrees, because i.e. .NET has conquered the development market in a way that SUN with Java could only dream about.

The time that Java developers laughed at MS products is over. In fact, I know of a company that's retraining some of it's Java consultants to .NET. ;)

Anyone in IT that still calls Microsoft MickeySoft doesn't have a clue what going on...

# re: One advantage of MS over Open Source

@Patrick:
I think Microsoft has always released good quality products, it's just that the bugs kept people from using them. Until, as Ernst says, products like W2K came out and proved MS-DOS (like) memory management was the problem in Win98. It had to be compatible. Win2K is based in WinNT.

But also the older Office suite and other products by Microsoft became popular way before they were really stable.

The key to the succes of Microsoft are thing like :
- Best marketing in the world!
- Better good at stealing, then badly self-invented.
- Best marketing in the world!

:)

Look at the XBox, it's not the best system, it's also not a bad system. It's just, like the PS2, _a_ system to play games on. But the succes is from marketing and giving them away almost for free. :)

Same with Whidbey, Longhorn, WinFS, etc. Everyone is just soooo interested because of marketing hype. Why would you want WinFS? Because search is faster? Because for normal users, WinFS doesn't bring much more then that, I guess...

# re: One advantage of MS over Open Source

Dennis you are Wrong......

XBOX is Much... Much more than a PS2.
because the XBOX is a Media Center Extender as well.

This means that if you have a Media Center PC somewhere in the house you can enyou all the digital media on it everywhere in the house via an XBOX.

This is a pretty cheap solution cause a xbox is under 200 Euro's.

For example some people have Digital TV. The problem with that is if you have more televisions you will buy more receivers.

Now by connection the Receiver to the media center pc you can wacht the digital channel everywhere where there's an XBOX.

I Believe a Media Center PC can serve up to 5 Media Extenders Simultaniously.

So Record once and look everywhere where there's an XBOX.

You can forget this functionality when you buy and PS2.