[Info-vax] VMS survivability

[Dan Cross]

Dave Froble  <davef at tsoft-inc.com> wrote:
>A question I'd ask, is, would Linux have done so well, if it was nothing more 
>than "free Unix"?

Linux was in the right place at the right time.  The industry as
a whole was trying to move away from Unix, in no small part due
to AT&T having been freed from the shackles of consent decrees
and attempting to enter the computer market.  They had Unix, and
Unix had become the "open system" of record, so they wanted to
exercise control over the considerable financial pie that had
baked around Unix.  Simultaneously, 20 years of research into
systems had been (at best) haphazardly retrofitted onto Unix,
which had become a bloated mess and people legitimately thought
that moving systems in new technical directions was the right
way to go.  Remember the hype around microkernels?

Meanwhile, the whole industry missed three critical factors: the
power of installed base and source-level compatibility across
Unix variatns; Moore's law the in particular the implications
this had for making cheap x86 machines performance competitive
against much larger workstation and server-class machines at a
fraction of the cost; the emotional attachment people had to
systems beyond any rational basis for favor.

So people wanted Unix, and Unix was getting hard to get.  UC
Berkeley had produced a port that removed almost all of the
AT&T code from the base system, but of course AT&T sued
Berkeley over that.  Enter Linux: a from-scratch
reimplementation of the basic system interface, but unencumbered
in any way by AT&T/USL copyright.  Oh, and it ran on cheap PCs,
not expensive workstations.

I remember at one point in the mid-90s someone showed me a PC
they had bought.  It was maybe half as good as a mid-range Sun
workstation, but at a quarter of the cost.  Moreover, PCs were
getting better for the cost faster than workstations were; it
was therefore axiomatic that at some point the price/performance
curves would cross, and that the future was not in the
workstation market.  Of course, the same thing had happened to
the minicomputer market a decade prior.

So as PCs got better and better, the price of hardware started
driving towards zero.  These days, I can buy a Raspberry Pi for
USD 100 that gives performance comparable to a top-of-the-line
gaming rig from a decade ago.

In that environment, software costs start to dominate, at which
point there's a strong incentive to drive those towards zero, as
well; using a gratis operating system becomes almost a given.

The next big cost center, of course, is on support; but by using
a common offering (like Linux), one can amortize that with
economies of scale.

In article <tsu03v$8td$1 at panix2.panix.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge at panix.com> wrote:
>When Linux was new, that was all it was.  There were some competitors like 
>xinu and minix, but Linux actually provided a full functional system.  Because
>it was unixlike, there was plenty of existing software for it (including the
>whole gnu back catalogue).  Because it was free, the barriers to entry were
>very low.

Neither Xinu nor Linux was a competitor to Linux; both were
pedagogical systems designed for teaching.  I do think they
filled a bit of a niche among enthusiasts, but Linux's early
competitors were things like COHERENT (absolutely killed by
Linux) and commercial distributions of System V.  I suppose
Arne will now tell us those are doing just fine.

>One might ask if VMS would have done so well if it hadn't come with the Vax.
>Lots of folks bought VMS because of the hardware, not because of the software.
>Those folks were the first to abandon ship when the cheap and fast workstations
>came out in the eighties.  (I'm talking here of mostly development folks and 
>scientific computing folks who weren't so tied to architecture and who were
>very sensitive to price/performance.)

Just so.  Hence, if one wishes to see VMS survive, one must find
a way to make VMS attractive to new developers and so on.

	- Dan C.