14 Mar
2017
14 Mar
'17
8:43 p.m.
On Tue, Mar 14, 2017 at 7:35 AM, Tim Bradshaw <tfb(a)tfeb.org> wrote:
But the people who have spent 9-figure sums on all
this
marginally-functional tin that the Unix vendors foisted on them don't
look at it that way: they just want something which is not Unix, and
which runs on cheap tin.
Fair enough -- but I think that this is really another way of describing
Prof. Christiansen's disruption theory. The "lessor" technology wins
over "better" technology because it's good enough.
I'm curious for the Banks, in your experience - which were the UNIX vendors
that were pushing 9-figure UNIX boxes. I'll guess, IBM was one of them.
Maybe NCR. What HP, Sun, DEC in that bundle?
Linux is not Unix, and runs on cheap tin.
I
believe that
the point you are making is that "white box" PC's running a UNIX-like
system - aka Linux could comes pretty close to doing what the highly touted
AIX, NCR et al were doing and were "good enough" to get the job done.
And that's not a statement about UNIX as much as a statement about, the
WINTEL ecosystem, that Linux sat on top of and did an extremely impressive
job of utilizing.