6 Feb
2021
6 Feb
'21
4:02 a.m.
On Fri, 5 Feb 2021, Larry McVoy wrote:
I think Intel is sort of in the same place Sun was.
Fat, dumb, and
happy with the profits they are making and can't see what is coming.
I guess we'll find out soon enough; there is a history of companies "too
big to fail" of failing.
It just didn't make sense to have $20,000 Sun
workstations when a $2,000
PC was at least half as good. I advocated for SunOS on x86, to me, it
was the operating system that delivered the value, everything just
worked on SunOS, for any other OS you were doing the configure dance.
Offer SunOS on x86 and capture the low end market. The East coast Sun
did the road runner but West coast Sun sneered at it, patches for x86
were not processed very fast, if at all. It's a shame.
I actually got to play with a Road Runner at a Sun conference (its
hostname was "milpitas" of course) and came away impressed that one of the
best OSes ran on the worst possible architecture :-)
If Intel doesn't want to make money off of the
cheap, but very high
volume, $20 SOC, Apple has shown that it has the chops to make a cheap,
fast, and power sipping M1 chip. Pretty impressive and if I were Intel,
I'd be nervous. Apple has shown they can switch architectures pretty
painlessly repeatedly. The x86 lock in isn't much of a lock in these
days.
Well, when you're big enough to be able to make both your own HW and SW
then things will go smoothly (which is why my MacBook works so well). I
look forward to Brian Krebs' "Patch Tuesday" announcements; I can only
think that it's some form of "Stockholm Syndrome" despite there being many
free alternatives.
Heck, I remember in the days of the Pee-Cee "grey imports" that if it
didn't run Flight Simulator then it was illegal; shortly afterwards if it
didn't run FS then nobody would buy it...
Ah, "schadenfreude" is such a beautiful word :-)
-- Dave