August 29, 2001, 12:00 AM — My column last week about getting rid of Code Red prompted some
suggestions, a few of which I wanted to share with you this week. If
you are fed up with all of the issues surrounding running your Web
storefront on Windows, then you might want to read on and see if any of
these resonates for you.
One service provider friend of mine is still running all of his hosted
applications on Windows NT, mainly because he knows how to make it
secure and run the various applications reliably. He was reluctant to
get involved in Windows 2000 precisely because of the iterative
patching issues that I mentioned last week, and now it looks like he
won't even bother with the upgrade. And don't look for him to be one of
the first to adopt Microsoft's .NET servers either: he plans on
sticking with NT as long as he can.
When he told me this, I was taken aback. After all, we all like to
consider ourselves leading edge, being able to run the latest stuff
with all the spiffiest features. But who has time to be leading edge
these days? Another friend of mine wrote: "I'm being called on to
provide my expertise in so many meetings and projects that I no longer
have the time to do the things that made me an expert. I don't seem to
have the time to read and muck about with stuff that I used to and it
was those very 'time wasting, unproductive' things that kept me on top
of things."
This seems to be a common situation, perhaps more common than many of
us would like. Without the freedom to spend some time exploring new
products, keeping up with developments and deciding when to switch your
storefront systems to something else is hard.
Another friend wrote to chastise me about sticking with Windows. "I am
baffled that you leave your readers with the impression that they have
no choice but to continue using Microsoft products. We began six months
ago moving everything to what I am calling the 'trinity' --
Apache/PHP/mySQL. These three tools, combined with a rich set of PHP-
based applications, is truly liberating, and is hands-down the best
development environment I have used in more than thirty years of
computing."
Others wrote in with similar defenses of Linux and UNIX. And I
certainly didn't want to leave you with the impression that Windows is
the only development environment worth considering. Hardly. But should
you switch to Unix? It may merit some careful review.
I don't like the idea of switching platforms and applications on a
whim, and certainly your level of frustration with Windows needs to be
at a high enough point (or low, depending on how you interpret it) to
spend the time, money, and sheer energy to make the switch. If you are
like my second correspondent who spends the majority of his day in
meetings, then you probably will never switch away from your current
systems because you don't have the time to even consider the
alternatives.
Usually, I like to end these essays with an upbeat note or a
prescription for how to fix the problems I bring up. But these issues
don't have any easy fixes, and the state of the Internet and e-commerce
in 2001 is a lot different from where it was a few years ago. The
servers are more complex, the solutions aren't as transparent or as
simple, and your legacy systems are more entrenched with more
investment required on your part to dislodge them. I do hope that these
words will inspire you to consider some alternatives as you design new
systems and add new pieces to your Web storefronts, and hope you'll
share with me some of your solutions and frustrations along the way.
