Sucked In Again

Shit... I got sucked in again by the "journalists/analysts" who post on the blogs on ZDNet. Turns out Mr. Waineright is one of those anti-MS agenda guys and is just using ZDnet as a mechanism to push his thoughts. He posted again today about how, by buying a LAMP based product (Foldershare), MS "fatally undermine[s] any pretension that it offers a superior platform for on-demand services."

How art thee wrong? Let me count the ways:

  1. A good idea is a good idea... acquisitions are about getting good ideas, good people and good technology. Having something implemented in .NET is pretty far down the list.

  2. I use Foldershare all the time, and it appears to be a rich client implemented right on top of the Windows APIs. Who knows why they chose the platform they did for the website, the real hard work goes on on the client. If LAMP was so good for that, why did they implement a rich client at all? Or why isn't the rich client based on PHP?

  3. The number one web service in the world is ... wait for it ... AIM. What's that built on? I actually don't know. But behind that is MSN Messenger or Hotmail certainly rank up there. And despite the urban legends, Hotmail runs Windows. In fact, many of these web services are now running on 64-bit Windows giving them a 10x performance gain. Does that sound fatally undermined?

Yes, I know that Google runs on Linux and is certainly among the top web services in the world, but the point wasn't that you couldn't run a web service at scale with Linux, Mr. Waineright's point was that you couldn't do it on Windows. I know I say this every time I find one of these extremists, but this will be the last time I dignify these views with a response. It's just not worth it.