On Oct 3, 2005, at 9:58 AM, Byron A Jeff wrote:

>> The breadth of hardware that windows will
>> support with little user-side knowledge is impressive.  I mean, linux
>> does pretty good, all things considered, but windows is AMAZING.
>
> I did miss the smiley right?
>
No, I'm quite serious.  For instance, cisco has at various times 
considered
building a router based on a generic PC-style platform (the last time I
think was back when it looked like Novell might build such routers and
be able to sell them much cheaper than ours; a long time ago.)  After
some study, we decided that ALL the time (and more) that we would have
saved by not having to design the platform itself would have been taken
up by compatibility testing (motherboards, processors, bioses, network
cards, etc.) instead.  Note to mention that most of the 
cheap-off-the-shelf
components that made such a platform attractive seemed to have a product
lifetime measured in months, after which you had to start testing 
again...
The technology churn rate in PC platforms is mind-boggling...

BillW
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