[geeks] Opinions on "A personal view of Sun Microsystems"?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

> They didn't break any *software* compatibility, but they certainly
> broke a whole bunch of *hardware* compatibility.  I suspect there'll
> be machines running AIX 5.1 long after 5.2 and 5.3 fall by the
> wayside.

Oh, absolutely.  The list of supported adapters is cut in half, and
there are probably quite a lot of people that need those older
peripherals.  5.1->5.2 was a nice upgrade, though.  5.2->5.3 was almost
as good.  I'd swear that my 7043-150 uses half as much CPU time to
babysit I/O in 5.3 as it does in 5.1.  It's a pity what happened to the
man pages in 5.3, though; I liked the IBM format much better.

> People really care about version numbering schemes?  I guess there's
> no cure for stupid.

There really isn't, but Sun should have enough suits around to know that
stupid things like that matter to the people who sign the checks.

> Just curious, but how much do you think it cost them to switch
> platforms vs. just upgrading to the latest Solaris?

Probably a lot more than they ever thought, but the concept of a "major
OS upgrade" every two years scared them away.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "Humans that lose the capacity to think become
Elgin, TX          (    creatures whose existence has no value."
USA                 )                      --Schwarzwald, _The_Big_O_