[thelist] Microsoft's Relevance Fading?

[Frank]

On Tuesday, September 10, 2002, 7:23:40 AM, you said:

S> I feel that you may be off-topic with this question. It isn't web-related,
S> really, IMHO. It's more of a larger, life-size issue regarding the whole
S> computer business, and from what I understand, based on speculation. An
S> opinion article, the way I see it.

It *is* a larger question, and I believe topical. Maybe a little
context or a rephrase might help. I can, however see that
how from one point of view it might have had appeared as a
troll or a rant. That's not the case.

The question arose from another: If I were planning a
internet/intranet network for a government, a public sector client,
is it still safe to recommend MS products?

Given the items I listed earlier, can we still trust recommending
their servers? Use their OS and technologies? IMHO it's a pretty
central question to our work as web-devs.

If you were in charge of re-designing and re-building a large
portion of your government's web sites, would you feel comfortable
in recommending that your government to spend several million
dollars in MS products? Remember that this will have ramifications
for at least 10 years affecting (at the very least) hundreds of
people working on it, and millions of users.

MS used to be *the* safe bet. I'm just wondering if that's
still true. When it comes down to the crunch, with your
blood on the line, would you fight for or against an MS
centered strategy for your govts inter/intra net?

If I can't get knowledgeable responses from this
list, I have no idea where else I could.