Even more, consider "upgrades". Dell sells you a PC running NT. Eighteen months later the thing is obsolete, so you buy another one and send the first machine to the property management folks, who donate it to a school, where they run Windows 95 on it. Or maybe it gets sent to the support guys, who load it with Linux and turn it into a web server. In any event, one of the least likely things to happen to it is that it will continue to run NT.
On the other hand, we are only recently able to get our users to relinquish their SPARCstation 2s (most but not all with clock-doubled 40/80MHz Weitek chips). There are still about 35 of these machines out among our total of 160 Sun systems. Most are running Solaris 2.4, a few are running Solaris 2.6, and are all doing useful work. These machines were purchased as long ago as 1991. How many 80386 systems do you think are out there running (or perhaps crawling) Windows NT 4.0?
With the rare exception of units being reloaded with Linux (I put RedHat 4.2 on a SPARCstation 2 a while back and was amazed at how much faster it was than under Solaris 2.4) or {Open,Net}BSD, virtually all hand-me-down and resale SPARC systems run some version of Solaris. You will even find the occasional pre-1990 Sun 3 system running at least Solaris 1.x (SunOS 4.1.x).
The volume of sales of Windows NT X86 is an extremely poor indicator of the number of X86 machines running NT, IMHO, whereas sales of SPARC systems is a very good indicator of the number of SPARC systems running Solaris. |
