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Technology Stocks : Compaq
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To: Harry Landsiedel who wrote (28058)6/23/1998 9:03:00 PM
From: Bill Fischofer  Read Replies (1) of 97611
 
OT: "Son of SAA"

That's the curse of history. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Let's take a short stroll down memory lane.

IBM's core problem has always been getting the Tower of Babel of its various OS divisions to present a passably coordinated face to the customer. In 1987 IBM launched what turned out to be a grand flop called "Systems Application Architecture" (SAA) which was supposed to be a common set of APIs and interfaces that all IBM OSes would adhere to and thus paper over their internal differences. Having worked for IBM at the time, I can tell you that "SAA compliance" was a huge political football throughout the OS divisions. Careers were made by the various trackers and coordinators as well as the architectural planners who would lobby and politick over which features of their own OS would or would not get the SAA stamp of approval and shoved down everyone else's throats.

In the end, predictably, SAA collapsed of its own weight, but also because its main taskmaster, VP Earl Wheeler, retired. But the dream of software layer that could be troweled over the gaps in the various OSes lived on. IBM's embrace of Java is the latest incarnation of this ancient dream and will be as successful as the previous versions in solving the root problem.
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