.NET: Asbestos for the enterprise?

ziggy on 2003-05-20T17:35:02

Craig Conway[*], CEO of PeopleSoft, describes .Net as the last thing enterprises need for running their applications:

Speaking at the company's 2003 Leadership Summit in Sydney, Australia, Conway said the state of the global economy makes it imperative for business to control IT costs and advocated Linux-based server-centric operating environments for enterprise applications as one way to achieve this goal.

[....]

"Running enterprise software on a PC is a known bad thing. It's like asbestos," he said. ".Net is a home formula to make your own asbestos. PeopleSoft is absolutely convinced enterprise software should not be resident on PCs."

The subtext behind Conway's remarks is a pro-choice/anti-microsoft one. Yet I think he's also emphasizing another point: you are going to have to port enterprise applications. That's a given. The issue is what the canonical enterprise infrastructure will use in five years' time: Sun/Solaris/Java, Microsoft/.Net or Linux.

(via Phil Windley)

 

[*] No relation to John Conway. :-)