Gene,
I would like to hear the theory you mentioned in passing to Cheryl.
RE SUNW futures, I am reminded of Data General, HP, SGI, Unisys and others that have concluded that INTEL is the only way for them. HP gets to hedge a bet, but Merced is INTEL despite their collaboration.
I suspect even IBM will jump on the bandwagon with SHV / NUMA based systems, quite possibily oem'd by INTEL and running AIX, once Merced is out and about.
Hard to tell where CPQ / DEC will end up with respect to volume unix-based shipments in the future.
With all this effort in the enterprise unix market going towards INTEL, I think it will be up to SUNW alone to prove they can prosper despite all this. I'm not saying they won't be successful, but it is an uphill slog.
It will be interesting to see which UNIX varient ends up dominating. One thing for sure, it won't be on a SPARC chip.
There are also all those other pesky things to think about like chip economics, fab plants, etc.
It concerns me that sunw seems content to go it alone. The other players will get support from the big application vendors; then it will get down to "saftey in numbers"; price; and compatibility. |
