SCO support for Xenix (or lack of).

[Wm E. Davidsen Jr]

In article <36 at choreo.COM> chris at choreo.COM.COM (Chris Hare / System Manager) writes:

| I teach SCO classes as an authorized instructor and it is often a hot topic
| of debate over a lunch, however, what often comes out of the debate is that
| the people who are arguing for XENIX will eventually switch or be switched
| to SCO UNIX.

  Perhaps. Certainly if SCO stops selling Xenix (not just supporting)
then they will switch. However, although some will switch to SCO UNIX,
some will evaluate other vendors and switch.

  We are currently looking at UNIX vendors for just this reason (no NFS
for Xenix), and the only place SCO currently wins cleanly is the
compilers, and that only if you need or want cross compile. They win on
security for the kernel. Price is very strange, clearly if you have more
than one system ESIX wins that. Make your own choice on system
reliability, but even SCO people at UNIX-Expo said that Xenix was a more
stable product.

  In short, there was only one Xenix vendor, there are many UNIX
vendors, who offer price, performance, or stability advantages to some
customers. It is not clear to me that your comment about moving to SCO
UNIX is completely true. Another vendor told me that "Xenix customers
are up for grabs." That's probably somewhat true.

  SCO obviously feels that they will gain more customers calling the
product UNIX then they lose by dropping their Xenix customers. Open
Desktop is another interesting product, since most of it comes from
other vendors, and it's likely that SCO makes a lot less profit on ODT
than a comparable UNIX system.

-- 
bill davidsen - davidsen at sixhub.uucp (uunet!crdgw1!sixhub!davidsen)
    sysop *IX BBS and Public Access UNIX
    moderator of comp.binaries.ibm.pc
"Getting old is bad, but it beats the hell out of the alternative" -anon