What's the verdict ?

• NT definitely gaining ground in corporate installations
• However, NT is not killing off Unix - which will thrive well into the next century
• Unix is still the best solution for large databases and other enterprise-scale jobs
• NT scalability still sucks - and NT (3.51) has no time server, which may rule it out for large on-line transaction processing (OLTP) systems
• Microsoft has a strong tools strategy with Visual Basic, VB for Applications, VB Script, Visual C++, and OLE. However, as users become more Internet-savvy and multi-platform-minded, that strategy must become less proprietary and Windows-based. Sun has blazed a path with Java that Microsoft needs to follow.

The Bottom Line I<>In the end, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to which OS is better. Experts (i.e. you) who want to craft the best possible solution for a given business problem must be knowledgeable enough and open-minded enough to adopt either OS-or both.