Market Share erosion to PC Unix?
All -
I'm new to this thread, and I'm sure you all have been over this issue many times before. OK then: Is the exponential growth in PC unix (linux, bsd, etc.) a major issue to SUNW?
Summarized from IEEE Spectrum, "The Workstation Shift", Sept p21, by The Linux Newsletter:
The Workstation Shift, a Summary by Oleg Dulin:
I have found an interesting article in the September issue of
IEEE-Spectrum. The article is on page 21, it is called "The
Workstation Shift" by John R. Hines. It is a fairly long article
so I'll just quote what I find important.
Hines is president of Semiconductor and Software Consulting
Engineering Inc. of Richardson, Texas. In his article he states
that as Windows NT and Linux become more popular, it is more
important to support both these platforms than all other desktop
operating systems and proprietary UNIX platforms:
"In 1995 1.4 million workstations were sold, 800,000 running Unix,
500,000 running Windows NT, and well over 100,000 running Linux.
All the Linux systems ran on Intel boxes, and almost 40 percent of
all workstations were Intel boxes, not proprietary hardware. Sun's
and HP's combined market share had shrunk to 30 percent of the
total market, despite a 17 percent growth in units shipped
annually (420,000 units in all).
The workstation market in traditional UNIX-on-proprietary-hardware
continues to expand, at a respectable 10 percent per year. But the
Linux-and-Windows-NT-on-Intel-box-workstation market is growing
exponentially. Figures on Linux are difficult to get, but its 1997
sales are likely to be about 500,000, equal to half the sales of
all proprietary UNIX systems for workstations. For its part,
Microsoft predicts that in 1997 it will sell 1 million Windows NT
Server workstations, which is equal to the predicted number of
proprietary UNIX-based workstation sales.
So maintaining applications that run only on a couple of versions
of Unix is no longer the best use of resources, when with only a
few modifications the same applications could run under NT and
Linux, too
Anecdotal:
I'm a typical PC unix user -- all my boxes run Linux, I use one at work for signal processing simulation (C-code), and one at home for a Web server. PC Unix machines do everything except run commercial engineering tools not ported to x86. Will CAD vendors always keep their tools away from x86 machines ?
Steve |
