AT&T Joining OSF

[John Chambers]

In article <3d999147.d8e9 at apollo.COM>, gallen at apollo.COM (Gary Allen) writes:
> In article <5838 at orstcs.CS.ORST.EDU> kramerj at beasley.UUCP (Jack Kramer - OSU Gene Res) writes:
> >I certainly hope that the OSF confusion tactic works as well as all 
> >previous IBM and DEC attempts to eliminate UNIX and any other non-
> >proprietary OS's.  
> 
> Just because YOU find something confusing doesn't make it a "confusion tactic"
> (after all, you don't understand why VMS doesn't run on non-DEC hardware :)).
> OSF has made it (I think, reasonably) clear what their intentions are and
> why. If you don't like that, hey, what can I say? If OSF produces something
> you like, I think you'll think OSF ok. If they don't, they won't stay around.
> I hope that sounds like a reasonable compromise to you?

Um, isn't this a bit naive?  The past 20 years of the computing field have
pretty much proven that IBM can market nearly anything they want, regardless
of its quality.  Their products have covered the full range from super-shoddy 
to incredibly-good, and this has relatively little to do with sales.  OSF,
with IBM's sales budget, could sell a buggy, user-unfriendly Unix to much
of the market and convince people that it was good.  (Can you say DOS or
OS/2?  I knew you could! :-)  The idea that the "market" will drive out
bad products is a nice piece of AdamSmithian Pollyanism, but the facts
in the computer field (where most purchase decisions are made by managers
who are ignorant of current computers) are clearly otherwise.

Not that ATT & friends are likely to do much better.  I mean, look at the
grand mess they made of shared memory, despite the fact that the Multics
people had already shown them how to do it right.  :-(

> Eliminate UNIX? You mean compete against UNIX? Excuse me, we didn't realize
> that it was a sacred cow.

Nah; in fact, it's getting to be high time that we started seriously talking
about a good follow-on to Unix.  We know enough about Unix's good and bad 
points by now to do a better job.  But it ain't gonna come out of any official
industry committee, any more that Unix did.  We'd just end up with an OS
equivalent of Ada, and we all know how much better Ada is than C. (Or maybe
it'd be more like PL/I and OS/MVS. ;-)

-- 
John Chambers <{adelie,ima,maynard,mit-eddie}!minya!{jc,root}> (617/484-6393)

[Any errors in the above are due to failures in the logic of the keyboard,
not in the fingers that did the typing.]