OS update: Big three dominate in agencies

| SPECIAL TO GCNThere are three topics you should be wary of introducing in polite conversation: religion, politics and operating systems.Mention the OS word in the wrong place at the wrong time and you might find yourself in the middle of a holy war over what constitutes the best foundation for computing.True believers of one camp or another, who abound in tech shops and the trade press, will try to convince you that their choice is the only choice, the anointed system that outshines those of the enemy. Passions over operating systems run high indeed, though not entirely without reason. An OS is the central nervous system of any computing environment, be it a palm-size device or a large enterprise. And your choice of OS can be the key to your success as a manager.But the truth is there is no such thing as the best OS. All operating systems have strengths and weaknesses, and which one works best for you depends largely on the applications it is to be used for.The bottom line for most of us: Which OS delivers the best bang for the buck? Which is the most functional and reliable, offers the best management tools and provides the best overall performance for the tasks assigned to it? Which is cheapest? Factoring in the costs of hardware, software licenses, technical support agreements, upgrades and personnel training isn't a trivial consideration.With this in mind, I've taken a look at some of today's most prominent operating systems'Microsoft Windows and the leading versions of Unix and Linux. Microsoft Corp. rules the client side, taking in 87 percent of the OS revenues in the PC market. This isn't likely to change for some time, even with the emergence of functional and inexpensive Linux desktop and workstation OSes.Unix, designed mainly for servers, doesn't really compete with Windows at the desktop PC level, and Apple Computer Inc.'s excellent Mac OS software only runs on Macintosh products.Microsoft has parlayed the astounding success of Windows 95 and Windows 98 into two new products: Windows Millennium Edition and Windows Professional 2000. Both correct some of the more noticeable flaws of Win9x by offering the stability and dependability of Windows NT, while retaining features such as Plug and Play, Universal Serial Bus support and first-class help, and introducing a wealth of advanced multimedia, home networking and Internet features.Windows Me exists mostly for home users. Win 2000 Professional is better for workplace users who want high reliability, enhanced security features, excellent support for notebook computers and compatibility with Win 2000 Server editions.I use Win 2000 Professional in my home office and love it, but I offer a couple of caveats. First, it's a real memory hog, and installing it over Win98 can prove to be difficult, if not impossible'I had to wipe my entire hard drive to install it. Second, it can be difficult to locate drivers for older peripherals that ran perfectly well under Win98. Many third-party vendors are just now getting around to creating Windows drivers, although a determined user can find them on the Web.In the final analysis, the Win 2000 suite represents Microsoft's attempt to develop a full-service bank of OS products. The Win 2000 Server suite is designed to carve out a place in the high-end server market that until now has been dominated by Unix systems.Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Windows 2000 Datacenter Server offer the stability of NT with a raft of new features. Among them are enhanced symmetric multiprocessing scalability, clustering and load-balancing support, improved Internet Information Services for Web hosting and management, advanced Active Directory services and excellent security and encryption features.While there has been considerable fence-straddling of late by the leading makers of Unix OSes'Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.'they aren't about to give up their edge in the high end of the enterprise market without a fight.Electronic commerce has become a fertile field for Unix, with its emphasis on scalability, systems administration, security and reliability in an area in which even a tiny percentage of downtime can be significant.Unix scales brilliantly and can handle thousands, even millions of users. It is a mature, technically evolved system with a solid track record of performance, reliability and security in server environments. And Posix standards ensure a high level of compatibility among the various Unix iterations.Even with the significant improvements of Win 2000 over NT and Win9x, there's no certainty that agencies will abandon proven Unix-based solutions for mission-critical operations, even in the face of pressures from within or outside their organizations.Nobody can afford to ignore Linux anymore.The playful penguin concocted by Linus Torvalds has sharp teeth and claws, and is becoming a serious contender for a share of the enterprise server market. Linux is an open-source version of Unix, meaning that anybody may copy and compile its source code, provided they make the resulting changes available to anybody else.Is it freeware? Not really. The commercial OSes listed in the chart cost money to buy, though far less than Windows or mainline Unix.Linux has tremendous potential as an OS for everything from a desktop PC to enterprise servers. It is highly scalable and runs on a large variety of hardware, including commodity-priced Intel boxes. One of its primary uses is for setting up server farms that can be scaled up quickly and relatively inexpensively as the needs of an organization grow.Other uses include support for thin server tasks such as firewalls and e-mail servers, and Web-to-host middleware platforms.At press time, the next version of the Linux core, the 2.4 kernel, hadn't been released, but it will likely bring Linux into the enterprise OS circle with greater scalability, support for SMP and more speed and memory.You're in good company if you've already decided to take Linux seriously. Leading hardware vendors such as IBM, Compaq, Dell Computer Corp. and others are beginning to bundle Linux versions with their servers.If your PC is set up for a networked environment, Corel Corp.'s Linux OS Second Edition comes with a tool that will allow you to run most Windows applications. Corel's operating systems are desktop PC versions only; other makers produce both desktop and scalable server versions.Linux has a lot to offer in terms of price and performance. But no gain comes without pain.It's true that Linux vendors have solved their setup and installation woes, and some of them offer adequate, even excellent, support.But good support is not universal. Check to see what kind of support'free or for-pay telephone, online, e-mail, fax'is offered with a Linux OS.Neither does Linux have an abundance of third-party applications. With the possible exception of Corel's Linux OS Second Edition, there's nothing in the Linux world that approaches Windows for powerful applications support.XXXSPLITXXX-