[cctalk] OLD V NEW (Was: Old UNIX Systems

On 4 June 2013 16:14, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: [Sigh] And once again, Dave, you go off on one because someone sees things differently from you. Any mass-produced product, be it a car or a CPU, need a significant, sustained market share to prosper & continue being developed. If it drops below a certain % of the market, it stops making enough money for it to be worth continuing development. And remember, CPUs are insanely expensive to manufacture, not to mention design. This is not a conspiracy theory, it is simple economics. If nobody else uses Brand X CPU and the manufacturer and vendor of Brand X also offers systems with Brand Y, which outsells Brand X by 100? over and has thus got 100? the R&D budget, then customers are going to wonder why Brand X is worth so much money and if it's so good, why does Vendor X also offer Brand Y? After all, vendors A through to Z /also/ offer Brand Y and they seem to do fine. What is so special about Brand X? Why should I pay more for it? So they don't. They go with the safe choice, the choice everyone else is making. And Brand X's revenues fall further, until there is no more investment in it because it's not returning it, and then it dies. It happened with Alpha, it happened with Itanium (and umpteen other CPU lines from Intel and Motorola alone) and if they are not careful it will happen with SPARC and POWER. Sure, they may continue on as little cheap embedded chips, making decent money, but it will bring us even closer to a monoculture on the server end of things, as today, we have a complete monoculture in desktops and laptops. Monocultures are bad, but economics tends to create them. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884