Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 12:39:04 -0000 From: Paul Richards <paul@originat.demon.co.uk> To: "'freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG'" <freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: FreeBSD/Alpha Message-ID: <E191A8FCC38DD111A84900E029115B40A1F6@OCTOPUS>
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On Wednesday, January 28, 1998 3:53 AM, Jordan K. Hubbard [SMTP:jkh@time.cdrom.com] wrote: > This is not to say that I hate Digital - far from it - just about > every machine I've ever really admired came from that company. It > simply vexes me that there couldn't have been a lot MORE to my > dealings with such a promising company over the years, the limitations > on this generally being a direct result of various shortcomings in > Digital's upper-level management. Olson, for example, was openly > hostile to the whole workstation concept and his "there can be Only > One OS and its name is VMS" attitude hardly helped the company's Unix > strategy. Palmer, in turn, seems to have spent more of his time > dodging falling masonry than in trying to articulate a workstation & > server software strategy, and all the while you have these various DEC > IBUs wandering around essentially rudderless on the whole issue. "Are > we selling hardware? Are we selling software? Is that OS in > competition with us or helping us? We don't know and the people up to > don't know either." Vey true. > Perhaps the acquisition by Compaq will result in the right kind of > shakeup in DEC's management structure, I don't know. One can only > hope so. > Unfortunately I don't think so. All I've read over the last few days, not all relating to Compaq's aquisition, looks very bad for commercial Unix. From the press releases I've seen from Compaq the main benefit of the aquisition is Digital's support infrastructure. Digital had already shed large parts of it's corporation. The alpha chip looked doomed anyhow, the fabrication side of the business had been sold to Intel and Digital had already stated that they yould be supporting the IA-64 chip in the future. They've also sold off their networking arm as well. It looked to me at the time like they were shedding parts of the company that a prospective buyer didn't want in order to make them more attractive to said buyer. Compaq, immediately following the press release on the aquisition launched a marketing campaign for E2000, their enterprise range that is specifically targetted at ousting Unix from the corporate market. With Digital gone, that leaves Sun, HP and IBM. Only Sun are wholly dependent on Unix, the other two have a lot of NT interest. I don't think Sun's future is too sound either, they're hardware is vastly more expensive than NT hardware and these days the quality isn't significantly better. You'll find a lot of the parts inside a Sun workstation are the same as in a NT box. Solaris sucks, I actually get more done on my NT box than I do under Solaris! I think the upper management of Digital had given up trying to compete and for the last 12 months have been looking to cash in their assets. At the end of the day these people are driven by share price and for the shareholders this looks a good deal. Digital may cease to exist in any real sense but the Digital shares get converted to 0.945 Compaq shares (which says a lot about comparitive value of the companies) and the shareholders will be happy with that so therefore in business terms upper management are doing a good job. Business rarely makes technological sense, we techies would much rather see the best processor there is on every desktop running Unix but the business people don't care about the technical issues and sometimes cashing in the chips makes more business sense. I think this is the option Digital have taken. Compaq aren't interested long-term in the alpha chip or unix, what they were after was the technical support infrastructure, I suspect that in the mid to long term they will wind down the Unix side of the company in favour of NT (Digital itself was already moving this way in any case) and the alpha's future already looked bleak since it didn't look like it was going to be around after the IA-64 and the way things have panned out it looks like this was intentional. I think Digital sued Intel with the intention of clearing up loose ends before a sale and they had every intention of passing responsibilty for the alpha on to Intel so that the fabrication part of the company was out of the way for the Compaq negotiations to continue. One of the press releases I saw said that this deal had been on and off for many years and the reason Compaq had prevaricated was because they weren't interested in the bits that Digital eventually sold off. In other reports (all my reports are from CNET by the way, get lots of useful news if you subscrib to their daily mailings) it looks like Unix sales are in very serious decline. NT outsold unix by a huge margin last year (I forget the figures but you could find them at CNET I guess). It's not really a question of whether NT can do the job or not, it's a question of business. I was at Elsevier Science when they signed a five year deal with Microsoft. From what I could see it didn't have a lot to with the technical issues and had a lot more to do with share price of the respective companies. Back to the original point which has been totally lost. Is there any point to an Alpha port of FreeBSD? As with all things within FreeBSD, that's dependant upon the enthusiasm of the volunteers, very little gets done in FreeBSD because of a commercial need, whether the alpha's going to be an ongoing success isn't really relevant. If people are enthusiastic about porting FreeBSD to the alpha then it should go ahead. While this project is more successful than most it shouldn't lose it's roots as a fun place for hackers to do things they don't normally get a chance to do, porting to other architectures is certainly one of those things. Besides, increasingly I think projects like FreeBSD may have a longer term role to play in the world of computing. The big commercial players are going where the money takes them but there still will be a need for solid technical architecture that is not driven by the mass market, and for independent research platforms. FreeBSD is well placed to fill both those roles and expanding it's market to other platforms would be a very healthy thing to do. Paul Richards. Originative Solutions Ltd.
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