At Microsoft, failure is not an option

[mod at std.com (Michael O'Donnell)]

rll at lamothe.net wrote:
>> ...it's bundled with every product.
>>
>>    -- Ferenc Mantfeld                     ;->
>>                     (by way of boykinATmc.com)
>
>
> I find it very interesting that Joe Boykin of Mercury Computer
> is credited with this.  Joe Boykin, personally and single
> handedly forced Mercury's devlopers to give up their Unix
> machines and replaced them with NT in spite of much resistance.
> I find it odd that an NT advocate would have said this.


You seem to have painted with rather a broad brush here, and
given what I know about Joe, Mercury and that NT changeover,
I'd guess that indicates that either you or your source might
have an axe (or at least a pocket-knife) to grind.

First, it's true that most of the folks who had Sun boxes
on their desks at Mercury were compelled to switch over to
NT boxes running eXceed, but the Sun boxes didn't go away;
they were moved into a central power-and-air-conditioned lab
area as part of the transfer of the entire SW development group
into a new building.  Most folks still have nominal ownership of
their Sun boxes, still run pretty much the same software (as
X clients of their eXceed servers) and still inhabit largely
the same day-to-day development environment as they did prior
to said changes being made.  In other words, they didn't suffer
nearly as dramatically as your account might imply...  (Not that
there weren't complaints, just that the dust has settled a bit
and most folks seem to be OK with the new regime.)

Second, Joe has only a Mac on his desk, so please consider the
possibility that describing him as an "NT advocate" may be to
ignore most of the subtlety in the situation.

And finally, I'll hint that the attitude (good or bad) toward
*any* given OS inside Mercury might be harder to divine than
one might think.                                    (tee-hee!)

 [ There are other wrinkles here, too, like Joe reportedly
   being involved with Seattle Computing before they sold
   MSDOG to Bill Gates (D'oh!) but that's another discussion.  ]



P.S.  And to those who thought this was supposed to be a
      Linux-oriented list: it still is, and I'll shut up now.
                                              You're welcome!
                                                     ;->