[SunRescue] 5 major manufacturers?

[Brian McCloskey]

>From: Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>
>Reply-To: rescue at sunhelp.org
>To: rescue at sunhelp.org
>Subject: Re: [SunRescue] 5 major manufacturers?
>Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 16:34:07 -0400 (EDT)
>

>   I don't see anything wrong with pushing 3 different OSs, really.

the problem with pushing 3 different OSs, is that each one requires a 
development team, testers, software to be maintained etc. in short, they all 
require resources that are finite for any company, not least of which being 
money. in companies where this is going on (ibm, sgi etc.) these teams tend 
to vie politically for the lion's share of these resources which tends to 
produce a fluctuation in support for the varios OSs. this in turn is not 
entirely encouraging to most consumers, but also forces them many times to 
make decisions they should not have to make. while there shouldn't be 
anything wrong with a multi-platform environment, this is not something that 
any business strives for. most businesses will go to surprising lengths to 
stay with a single vendor in order to realize a return on their investments 
in support staff and end user training etc. this is one reason why sun does 
so well. all of their hardware (except the very ill-fated javastations) runs 
solaris. they developed the ultrapenguin linux kernel, and they don't have a 
problem with you running it, but they did this as a convenience to their 
user community, and after turning it over to the open source community they 
no longer devote significant (AFAIK) development resources to it. you also 
need to take into account mindshare. a companie's OS is a very significant 
part of their identity, especially for those who don't really understand 
what it is, but all too often are the ones paying for the product.

-wu
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