[Beowulf] Joe Blaylock's notes on running a MacOS cluster, Nov. 2007

[Geoff]

I guess we are getting way off-topic, but I still have to plug-in with one  
more observation:

I worked for SCO for 7 years prior to the Caldera buyout which resulted in  
"The Dark Time" and SCO's transformation into the "The SCO Group" and it's  
litigous ways.  There were a number of vendors developing and selling UNIX  
in various flavors for implementation on off the shelf hardware.  SCO and  
ISC being the two largest and more successful.

As far as I can tell selling those packages for $50 was just not  
cost-effective.  SCO UNIX cost approx $300 at that time though it could be  
had for steep discounts.  The company was doing pretty well but found that  
supporting a wider array of hardware and the need for customer tech  
support was driving the cost up.  Eventually those two functions were  
turned into revenue generators, meaning customers had to pay for tech  
support per call or buy a contract and hardware vendors could pay for  
preferential development support (which most of the large hardware vendors  
like Compaq, Dell, IBM and HP did).

Those were busieness trends and not technical issues and that seems to be  
what kills a lot of tech busiesnesses.  They do not make the transition  
 from small development shop to mid sized tech busieness to large  
technology busieness well, making bad busieness decisions along the way.

Charging a premium for support and development at the very time the *BSDs,  
Linux and the lower cost Windows NT became available was a bad idea and  
came about at a bad time.

IOW, $50 a seat for a *NIX with commerical support and backing was not  
technically or economically feasible.  SCO was huge in the database  on  
i386 market at that time and also in control systems (for things like  
power plants) and that requires a lot of work to support on the developer  
side.  The free OSs have matured since then now the market has changed.

-geoff



Am 21.11.2007, 22:45 Uhr, schrieb Greg Lindahl <lindahl at pbm.com>:

> On Wed, Nov 21, 2007 at 02:48:48PM -0500, Robert G. Brown wrote:
>
>> But what if they'd STARTED by selling NeXTStep as a Unix for PCs back
>> before Linux was really born, for $50 a seat.  OS/2 and Windows BOTH
>> would have been stillborn, and Jobs would be Gates today.
>
> Dude, at some point your "hey, this is really off-topic, and do people
> really want to hear my crazy what-if theories anyway?" should kick
> in. Right?
>
> -- greg
>
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-- 
-------------------------------
Geoff Galitz, geoff at galitz.org
Blankenheim, Deutschland