I found an interesting article through LinuxToday about how it seems like the end of Unix is near, but doesn’t blame Redmond for it; he thinks that it was Linux that did the Old Giants in.
Yes, SGI filed for Chapter 11 protection a week ago, and yes, Sun Microsystems got a shake-up in their upper echelons when Scott McNealy stepped down as CEO and Jonathan Schwartz took his place…and IBM and HP have all but abandoned their own proprietary Unix systems (when was the last time you heard an announcement about HP-UX or AIX? That’s what I thought :)
What I’m not so sure about is that it was Linux that killed the two giants nor made HP give up on HP-UX (IBM is a different matter, but I’ll talk about that later).
When did SGI start going downhill? When it became a Windows shop that stopped creating incredibly beautifull, powerfull and innovative workstations. And then, to make things worst, Rick Belluzzo decided to kill the windows workstations, spin out Cray and drop the NVidia lawsuit…and the company went down the hill.
As for Sun…they’ve made a lot of mistakes on their own, the biggest of which, in my opinion, was their constant change of mind about Linux…one day they say they support Linux, the next day they say they think Linux sucks, and then back to saying Linux is the best thing since sliced bread (I tried to put a few links there, but there’s too many for me to choose from, so…check them out yourself). I think that indecision made potential buyers think that Sun had lost its confidence on its own OS, which is what ultimately led to sales going down and the need for the changes that have been seen lately in their leadership.
HP…well, that’s the easiest one…HP-UX sucked from the day it was created, and HP never really put much of anything behind it, so it was, for all purposes, stillborn.
On the other hand, IBM’s case is an interesting one. They had a couple of very decent Unix systems, AIX and Dynix, and they worked well on getting them sold. And then, when they saw the writting on the wall because of the Wintel cheap desktop boxes taking over the enterprise, they took a good look at their options and took decesive action by putting all their might behind Linux. They invested billions of dollars in selling Linux, and today they are the number one corporate backer of the “Unix killer”…and they are making out pretty well…I’m sure they wouldn’t be investing billions into Linux support and advertising if they weren’t making billions out of it.
So…did Linux kill Unix? or did the Unix vendors kill Unix with their dumb decisions? I’m almost certain that it’s a combination of both, with the second one being the biggest culprit.
Had SGI moved to Linux and kept innovating their workstations as they used to, they may have not had to go Ch.11.
Had Sun stuck with Solaris or with Linux, they wouldn’t be in trouble today.
Had HP made a decent Unix, it may have survived.
And IBM…they are just laughing all the way to the bank.
Technorati Tags: linux, sun, sgi, ibm, hp, unix
Tags: ibm, linux, sgi, Thoughts, unix
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