🚀 go-pugleaf

rsrodger@wam.umd.edu (R S Rodgers) wrote:
>The Pentium
>already won the real battle -- another CPU line (PowerPC) wont have a big 
>chance to grab marketshare for several more years.

I'm not sure to which battle you refer.  Are you talking about the battle
between Intel compatible chips or all computer chips.  There was never a battle
between Intel compatible and anything else on PC compatible systems.  If you're
talking about the battle between Pentium and other Intel compatible chips, it
hasn't even won that.  There are still more 486 systems out there than there
are Pentium systems.  If you're talking about the battle between Pentium and
all other CPUs, it hasn't won that either.  The Pentium is only the processor
of choice for PC systems.  PowerPC has successfully replaced M6K on Macs.  All
the latest UNIX workstations use RISC chips.  That means that PC systems are
the only ones left using CISC technology.  If you were to recommend to SGI that
they use any Intel chip, they would just laugh in your face.

>---- Windows 95 and NT: IBM's OS choices for IBM hardware, x86 and PowerPC ----

Win95 is IBM's customer's choice for IBM hardware.  It says a lot about a
company that they are willing to preload a competitors system on their hardware
and even strongly support it to keep their customer's happy.  It makes one
wonder, "If Microsoft was in the business of selling hardware, would they be as
willing to preinstall OS/2 for their customers that wanted it?"

NT isn't their OS of choice for the PPC; AIX is.

>"That's not our primary target.  There are people out there who love 
> [OS/2 Warp] on the desktop, but our focus is on large enterprise customers."
>	-- chief executive officer Louis Gerstner (IBM) (July, 1995)

Not a bad business decision.  He didn't say that the personal desktop is not a
target.  He just said that it's not their PRIMARY target.  They want OS/2 to be
as useful to the large enterprise customer as it is to the home user.  They
don't want to have to offer two separate solutions like Microsoft does.  They
believe one program can cover both users.  Eventually, they want to be able to
run an OS/2-like system on everything from palm-tops to super-computers.  They
don't want people to have to learn a new operating system and buy new
applications simply because they've outgrown their present system.  They have a
much bigger picture in mind.  They want to be able to easily transition their
PC customers to workstations and their workstation customers to minis and so
on.

-- 
 |||||||    |||    ||||||  ||||||  |||||| |||||| ||
||         || ||   ||   || ||   ||   ||   ||     ||
||  ||||  |||||||  ||||||  ||||||    ||   |||||| ||
||    ||  ||   ||  ||   || || ||     ||   ||     ||
 ||||||  ||     || ||||||  ||   || |||||| |||||| ||||||
Time flies like an arrow.  Fruit flies like a banana. - Groucho Marx