[Info-vax] Gabriel Consulting Group surveys customers about Oracle's recent actions

[JF Mezei]

Keith Parris wrote:
> Gabriel Consulting Group has some interesting survey results, on why 
> people think Oracle dropped support for Itanium, 


Who sponsored the survey ?

Oracle saw there are doubts on the future of IA64 and leveraged this
with its announcement. Obviously in order to hurt HP and hope to steal
customers from them.

Oracle's decision would not have had any credibility if they had argued
that there was no future in the X86 platform. So the uncertainty about
IA64 is an issue with enough traction for Oracle to make such a big
decision to cut itsefl off from a big part of the market.

In the heydays of Alpha, SPARC was seen as the underdog with no future.
Other manufacturers poked fun at SPARC.

But SPARC got its second life when IA64 came around and became the new
underdog. And now others are poking fun at IA64. The thing is that there
are no new architectures on the horizon to take the "underdog" title
away from IA64.