Below an excerpt from an article in the current PC Week Online. More hype about NT and the engine(s) it's going to ride (PPro(s)). It would be interesting to see projections for next year and 1998 on home vs. business revenues for Pentiums, Pentium Pros, etc.
The Internet/intranet market
In 1995, Unix controlled more than 60 percent of the Internet server market,
according to International Data Corp. NT held about 15 percent. By the year
2000, predicts IDC, NT will control about 65 percent to Unix's 25 percent
share.
Intranets, NT shape server market (Inter@ctive Week)
The technical workstation market
Here's another overlooked market niche. I was going to give you my take,
but I received a letter from a reader that does such a good job that I'm
reprinting it instead. Here are the factors supporting NT's success,
according to NASA's Felix Torres:
1. The transition to the Pentium Pro will open up the general-purpose
technical workstation market to NT with a vengeance. Not since Apollo
dropped the Aegis OS has Unix had a serious challenger in this arena. By
hitching a ride on the Pro's RISC-class performance, NT's low
administration costs compared with Unix and security, combined with the
avalanche of cheap support software, will force Unix workstation vendors to
change their business model by either cutting prices or abandoning the low
end.
Sun's recent price cut on the Ultra-1 workstations and its aggressive
prices on new servers may be a sign of things to come as X86 technology
migrates upward into the last remaining desktop computing niches. Most
vendors of Unix technical software already have or are frantically preparing
NT versions of their specialized technical software.
Expect the Pentium Pro and Merced to take NT to places Microsoft has
never gone before, especially after Wolfpack is fully delivered and
debugged. Hallway clusters of NT-based Pentium Pro multiprocesors have
the potential to take sales away from even Cray.
2. The coming explosion of low-cost, relatively high-performance 3-D
graphics boards will allow NT systems vendors to target SGI the way
Windows 95 has targeted the Macintosh. While SGI is in no danger of
losing much business in its highly profitable core high-end visualization and
simulation markets, its loss-leader Indy systems are under serious attack
by Intergraph and other, lesser, vendors. And without the sheer numbers
those Indys bring to the fold, third-party software support for SGI could be
threatened very quickly. How soon until we see a Dell or Gateway 2000
3-D workstation? NT's open GL support is the enabling technology here
and it could radically change the landscape in this highly profitable market.
3. The growing use of ICAS technology to create remote NT graphics
terminals and Microsoft and Citrix's plan to deliver it as ActiveX Web
objects through a Netscape Plug-in means that every $500 Web terminal
will be a very good NT terminal and a serious threat -- not to PCs, like
Oracle's Mr. Ellison would like us to believe, but to the X terminal market.
For that matter, Tektronix's use of that technology in WinDD, along with
the NCD/Insignia Solutions NTrigue/WinCenter NT-over-X solution, is a
serious challenge to vendors of office automation software for Unix desktop
systems. NT is slowly and quietly acquiring all the pieces it needs to invade
the multiuser markets.
I work in the heart of technical workstation country, yet everywhere I look, I
see NT and Pentium Pro and clustering on the horizon. I expect the next
three years to be very interesting. From where I sit, I don't think the
so-called Wintel hegemony is anywhere near close to ending. I'm not even
sure its influence has peaked yet. |
