Originally posted by Vulcan
Dunno Curly, I don't work for MS nor am I an MS Zealot with some sort of twisted story to tell.
But my reasoning, if it was me, would be this:
A unix based solution is less hardware intensive. Especially in the area of web and mail services. Where the box has no GUI and is managed via HTML and other database hook ins. Boxes I've used like that in the past are also easy to cluster and manage as a cluster.
For example, the Cobalt rack products are excellent solutions for scaleable web serving, with clustering capabilities and redundancy. And as a rack solution much easier to manage. Especially when the application being provide is fixed and there are not more advanced user services being provided (ie RAS, print and file sharing, scheduling etc).
Maybe it boils down to this Curly. There are people in MS who are not fanatical enough to cut off their nose to spite their face? Maybe those people can sit back and say, well, here is a better solution, its not ours, but this is what we should use. Isn't it interesting that they can admit the advantages of the competitive product in this situation without being complete zealots of their own?
BTW, you still haven't answered my question about the first O/S hit by an Internet worm 
is that one eyed zealotry blinding you perhaps?
Concerning the BSD server at Hotmail, perhaps your response is correct. I don't think it's likely though. I think the folks who admininster Hotmail are aware of the potential for disaster with a NT server. If you are running no services but e-mail and page service, it's possible to screw a BSD box down to the point that it's inpenetrable.
Concerning the first OS hit by an worm ... heh, that's an easy one. First of all, MS didn't have a network aware OS at the time of the worm. Didn't that worm precede win3.1 and winsock.dll?
You're talking about the one the grad student on the East coast turned loose, right? As I recall, he took advantage of a broken rule set in sendmail and managed to get all of the sendmail servers from Chicago East swapping spit.
I'm sure the OS was UNIX.
curly
