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

[onedbguru]

On May 13, 9:13 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Which means that commodity processors as a whole along with Wall
Street's quarterly based results expectations has crippled technology
innovation. Instead, what we have is... let's try to make the same old
crap go faster.  Alpha pushed that envelop and had DEC/Compaq/HP had
the guts to push forward, we could now have multi-core Alpha or even
NextGen Alpha-like processors. IA64 was not in any stretch of the
imagination innovative - instead (IMHO) was a step backwards.

"Server companies" have also lost their ability to truly re-invent the
bus and motherboard technologies the way DEC did for so many years.