Another way to look at the choice may be in a cross-section of IBM products, and where RS/6000+AIX is put to heavy use vs. Windows. In some arenas, IBM makes the realistic business choice to implement on Windows because that's what some customers are conditioned to want - be it the choice which makes the most sense or not - and in some areas IBM makes an outright technology choice for *nix on RS/6000 or xSeries. In its Infoprint Manager product, IBM offers it in both AIX and Windows flavors - but the Windows version is the less serious implementation, where it makes sense in more modest environments, while the AIX version is the workhorse.
While we performance tends to dominant our thinking as technicians, it is just one factor. Security is another major factor - where nothing need be said about the history of Windows in that area. This leads to another major decision area, or perhaps philosophy, which is open systems. Do you want to commit to a proprietary operating system environment, or do you want a product of democracy, with published interfaces and formats? That choice is much like whether you want to go with LTO versus AIT, where you have a variety of vendors to choose from in the former choice. As Wanda alluded, in a proprietary environment, your ability analyze performance issues may be greatly limited...where one vendor "knows best", and "you don't need to know". In counterpoint, in a smaller environment with constrained staffing, no real systems analysis is going to be possible anyway; but at least with open systems you have the opportunity to adopt and implement tools at little or no cost. In my mind, the open systems choice is the most compelling factor. It give you choices, where you won't be led around like you have a ring through your nose - which by serendipitous metaphor makes me wonder what's going go happen to Windows customers with Longhorn. Richard Sims
