Microsoft’s primary language is C++. After all the windows operating system is written in C++ as is Visual FoxPro, VB, J, etc. Microsoft created C++ before it wrote windows. However, Microsoft's roots are in a one to a customer MSDOS operating system. It really won the desktop war with MSDOS and that carried over to windows. Windows has morphed many time from a single user graphics system run under msdos to networking to COM to DCOM with it latest incarnation of .NET. Microsoft has only recently adopted a strategy for the Internet. Although windows owns the desktop, it late in developing an Internet strategy.
UNIX is written from the get go to be a multi-user multi-tasking networked operating system. Out of it the Internet was born. Back in the early days of UNIX a mail system called UCCP allowed university around the country to receive and deliver mail. One university might send out a mail and in a couple of week it would make its way around the country right back to the initiating university. Mean while DOS was storming the country in the form of the IBM personal computer.
I was introduced to database with dbase II running on a North Star Computer under the CPM operating system. I was amazed when I first got my hands on FoxBASE+ because it was so much faster than dbase III. I remember switch to Visual FoxPro and the pain of learning OOPs. Visual FoxPro 3 was a major change from the character based FoxPro 2.5 and required a complete rewrite of my application. I’m just now beginning to really appreciate OOP and I’m currently using VFP7.
Microsoft is so big and has so many languages, databases, operating systems, etc. that it has to be careful least it compete with itself. I personally feel there is a large enough market in Linux to justify porting its office suite, but this could be used by Linux to compete with the window operating system. If I want to use MySQL, Visual FoxPro, Access, I need the window operating system. Most other major databases run on several platforms like Ingres, MySQL, mSQL, IBM’s DB2, Oracle, Sybase. Also, most of these databases allow access via many front ends regardless of which operating system you use. DB2 for example can use Java, C++, perl, etc. as a front end. Although Microsoft has never let me down, I feel a little insecure because I’ve made a major investment in time, energy and money in the Visual FoxPro language and I’m total dependent of Microsoft and Bill Gates Vision of the Future, and Visual FoxPro’s role in that.
The opinions express here a strictly mine.
Leland
