[Info-vax] Itanic is a dead end : IBM

[JF Mezei]

Marc Schlensog wrote:

> Refuse to support? Oh right, I guess it must be Red Hat's obligation to
> support an environment that loses them money.

I see it differently. Red Hat sees very little demand for Linux on IA64,
so they don't bother with it. HP has vested interest in IA64 so it will
try to spin it positively.

Other companies who are neutral (like Red Hat) would look at market
potential and wether running Linux on an IA64 box would give anyone any
competitive edge. The market seems to think that IA64 doesn't give you
any competitive edge now or into the future.

HP customers who have invested in proprietary OS eosystem are tied to
the OS and thus tied to the hardware.

VMS shows that you can keep a percentage of your installed base for a
couple of decades even with neglect of the platform. However, for HP-UX,
I suspect migration to another Unix is not very difficult, so customer
attachement may not be so high.

Oracle's move will test this.

HP will have a harder time getting new customers on a platform without
Oracle. And if Oracle starts a trend, then HP will find it harder and
harder to attract new customers. And if all that is left are legacy
customers whose applications are too hard to port (which is/was the case
for VMS), then HP-UX will gain an image of "legacy" just like VMS did.



WindowsNT was a good example. When it came out, Microsoft supported a
whole bunch pof platforms including 8086, Alpha, MIPS and PowerPC. Its
edged its bets to see which platform would succeed in replacing the
8086. One by one, they lost support of NT. Alpha was last to go, and
that is in part because Digital helped MS support Alpha-WindowsNT.

Same thing happened with IA64. At first, it was to be the big market
leading replacement for the 8086, so a whole bunch of people made
commitments (including Palmer promising Digital Unix on IA64). By the
time Merced had come out, it was clear that IA64 wouldn't become mass
market commodity and thus not replace the 8086. From that point on,
support for IA64 became weaker and weaker to a point where it is now
basically an HP system with HP targeting it only at a niche market.

If you follow the trend, it isn't hard to see where it is going.