[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[JF Mezei]

Bob Koehler wrote:

>    Despite my earlier comments, which were meant to explore a different
>    vien, I can't see why Oracle would want to continue SPARC.  The
>    business they seem to be in is almost totally independent of CPU
>    type.


In 2001, Carly and Curly justified their murder of Alpha by stating that
enterprise computing was moving towards commodity systems.

And while IA64 was not, is not, and will not be "commodity", I think
that the 8086 is getting sophisticated enough to "eviscerate the
underbelly" of proprietary chips. (I forget the name of the Compaq guy
who used that term (Windows will eviscerate Unix).

I think it is fair to state that the 8086, in the next couple of year,
will scale further up into the enterprise systems market.

The question is how long a niche requiring faster/bigger systems will
exist, and how big such a niche will be year by year.

Eventually, that niche won't be big enough to support both Sparc and Power.

Power has the advantage of also being used in video games.