From: mbk@lyapunov.ucsd.edu (Matt Kennel)
Newsgroups: comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.os.os2.advocacy
Subject: Re: Tidbits 01/06/93
Date: 8 Jan 1993 00:53:39 GMT
Organization: Institute For Nonlinear Science, UCSD
NNTP-Posting-Host: lyapunov.ucsd.edu
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mfraioli@grebyn.com (Marc Fraioli) writes:
: models of Alpha-based machines they were showing, NT runs on only one of
: them, the low-end EISA bus machine.  All other Alpha models use DEC's
: TurboChannel bus, and NT DOES NOT RUN ON THEM.  I asked the DEC
: representatives there about this, and they were very clear on it.  They
: said that if initial reaction to NT on Alpha was positive, they would
: consider porting it to their actual workstations in addition to their
: PCs, but this is by no means certain.  I was also told that there were
: no plans at all to put NT on any of their multi-processing servers and
: data centers-- NT's vaunted multi-procsessing abilities will not be
: exploited on Alpha hardware any time in the near future.  In the Q&A
: sessions that I attended on the future of Alpha computing, most of the
: questions were about VMS, interestingly enough.  Admittedly they had a
: separate session specifically for NT, and it was well-attended, and this
: may have drawn off NT-specific questions from the other sessions.
: 
: So in sum, Digital will be offering NT initially only on their PCs,
: including Intel and Alpha based PCs, but not on their workstations or
: servers, which will be Unix or VMS only for at least the next year or
: two.   The Alpha PC costs ~$7,000, and according to DEC will provide
: about 5 times the performance running NT of a 486/50.  They claim about
: 2.5 times the performance of Pentium, although this is obviously hard to
: be sure about.  It is obviously only for very high-end PC users, and
: those are really pretty rare.  The whole NT/Alpha combo didn't look too
: impressive to me.

What this means is that DEC won't allow the Rest of Us to buy cheap Alpha
machines and run UNIX.

The unforunate thing is that NT is not *so* much worse than UNIX that they'd
be really forced to do so, and instead the users will switch and put
up with it.

Why did UNIX become so popular?  Because it runs on the fastest machines
for the money.

What seems likely is that the computer companies will "segment" the market
(to increase their profit) offering their cheapest computers (best 
price/performance) as NT only, and forcing UNIX users to pay more $$, both
in hardware and software, even there is no good technical reason for
this.

In the best of all possible worlds, the advent of NT will bring UNIX
s/w prices down to those of PC's because of direct competition, but I'm
not so confident, as it's in no "big players" financial interest.

UNIX software shops want an "upscale" market so they can continue
to charge their 2x higher prices for the identical software they can port
for NT easily.

Microsoft doesn't want cheap UNIX software because then maybe people
would buy UNIX for their PC's instead of NT.


I'm still wondering about one thing.  Bill Gates' Big Secret.

When is MS going to start selling hardware?  They could make a killing
selling Alpha's + NT.


: mfraioli@grebyn.com	        	(So I'm a minimalist...)

--
-Matt Kennel  		mbk@inls1.ucsd.edu
-Institute for Nonlinear Science, University of California, San Diego
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