80-20 rule
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TC - Re: "We are seeing at the high end just a replay of the "industry standard, open architecture" history seen in the 1980s and 90s with PCs."
That appears to be what is playing out.
However, 2 camps developed & survived - the Wintel Camp and Apple (as you so rightly know !).
In this case, SUN appears to be a real close "analogue" of Apple - manufacturing both the hardware and the Solaris OS.
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Agreed. There may be several small niches, but the usual "80-20" rule of thumb will likely apply: the dominant player will get 80% of the design wins, with the rest splitting the remaining 20%. (Sometimes this is a 90-10 rule.)
What's intriguing is that the battle now appears to be shifting to the OS. Besides Windows 2000/XP, there are several flavors of Linux (though mostly very similar), flavors of BSD (FreeBSD, NetBSD, even Apple's OS X is a flavor of BSD), and various flavors of industrial-strength Unix/BSD: Solaris, True64, the Monterey project, SCO, too many variants for me to keep track of. Even a variant of VMS (from Compaq/Digital, now to be ported to the IA-64).
Were I Microsoft, with all of the powerful and time-tested Unices out there, I'd be paranoid that Windows 2000/XP may _not_ be the big winner in IA-64 systems.
(Windows 2000/XP surely will be the winner in desktops for years to come, but the IA-64 looks to be getting very strong Unix support. Microsoft may find themselves headed off at the pass in several years, as ordinary desktops start to make use of IA-64.)
--Tim May
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