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To: Ronny Kohavi who wrote (3493)	11/8/1997 3:40:00 AM
From: Jerry C.	Respond to of 14451

techweb.com Microsoft Goes Unix With IE 4.0 Browser For Solaris

To: Ronny Kohavi who wrote (3493)	11/8/1997 7:04:00 PM
From: John M. Zulauf	Respond to of 14451

> The MIPS ABI Group... I have nothing against the MIPS ABI groups work. It is important (certainly vital to MIPS), but it is a subset of what the UNIX community needed to do to (in the final analysis) win on the workstation low-end desktop market. Even though the UNIX vendors had (past tense) a strongly numerical majority in that sector, they never enjoyed the economies of scale those numbers should have allowed. Each vendor had their own motherboard design teams, sound hardware and software teams, network hardware and software teams, there own power managment software, their own processor daugther card technologies, LONG after any of these were meaningful differentiators in entry level computers. Infighting between the UNIX competitors rendered the UNIX standards bodies (for the most part) toothless, meaningless and insufficient in the face of a single coordinated hardware and software standard (orchestrated by Microsoft and Intel). BTW, I'm sure I didn't realize it soon enough either. I saw very acceptable performance from Linux on 33MHz 486's -- this should have been a warning shot that the PC architecture was up to the workstation task. If, then, Sun, HP, SGI, DEC, and IBM had instead decided to form a "low-end" processor-neutral motherboard/IO/sound/network standard, and gotten their software compatibility (RECOMPILE ONLY, bug compatible) story together, then I think the low-end of the UNIX workstation market could have grown substantially during the period while NT "toddled". This growth combined with meaningful growth in the ISV's could have kept the low-end UNIX market from being the when-you-gotta-have-the-best niche it is today. For a large number of traditionally UNIX workstation tasks, often NT is good-enough, and good-enough seems to be the big growth market. I wouldn' want to try to do real-time full resolution, video, secure, or mission critical work on a NT, but from a percentage stand-point these are not mainstream requirements. Strangely it wasn't the failure of UNIX that caused it's downfall in the low-end workstation space, but instead it's successes. The market was growing 40% a year, the Wintel platform had neither the maturity, robustness, capabilities, or applications to compete. What else for the UNIX vendors to do but infight for a few % market-share? What else indeed! What needed to be done was a complete transformation of thought of "who's the enemy" and "what's important." Was it REALLY important who's version of "stat" or "ls" was the standard? Did each of Sun, SGI, IBM, really have to have their own version of the "CD-audio-player" for X? Did each need it's own boot PROM standard for CD-ROMs? Their own standard for software installation? For hard-disk boot blocks? For system administration? The myriad of meaningless standards squabbles and needless, useless differentiation in the UNIX internicene wars is truly tragic in light of the NT "Visigoths" storming the gates of low-end workstation UNIX "Rome" while the vendors fiddled! Hindsight is 20/20, huh? On a hopeful note, I'm not seeing any hints that NT can scale to the enterprise as UNIX has (at least not just yet), MIS/DP guys have much higher standards for what is "good-enough" in the data center. I think the 2nd or 3rd gen IA-64 products with some UNIX/NT hybrid (like DEC is talking about) will probably start to be meaningful in that space. As for SGI, I think it has it's eyes wide open now. I wonder if Sun does? It'll been interesting to see if Sun ends up being a Harvard-Review case study.... Unofficially, john