From: "danny sofer" 
To: "Jo Walsh" 
Subject: black on white now...
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 13:18:06 +0100

time for a change, i spose.

anyway...

i am finally bowing to the inevitable. it's become an nt/iis/asp thang at
centaur. (frontier is reduced to a bit part) everyone seems happy with
that - so who am i to complain?

i read somewhere that the world is heading towards 1m asp developers
(when?). well, i guess that's a development community of sorts. i'm not sure
it's my community, though (like, i'm pretty sure it's not).

but it is all about community. that's why there ain't much future for
mediasurface or dynabase or vignette and why frontier and zope are going to
struggle.

small communities aren't enough at the level of languages, os's or
databases, or even production tools  (and application servers).

so i'm still waiting for the white horse. what's missing from linux is not
desktop applications (not for me, anyway): it's shit-hot development tools
that will enable me to build web sites and other internet services. perl
doesn't cut it, php+mysql doesn't quite do it for me either.

just like at the os level, it's the sheep-like (baa!) coalescing around
linux that is posing a threat to nt. we need something that will everyone go
"yeah, cool. it's better than asp". cos even if asp is nothing special, just
look at the size of that developer community.

sorry if i seem to have a one-track mind. i hope all is well. say hello to
stoke newie...

bye bye

danny.