- From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net>
- Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 21:29:00 -0500
- To: "Marshall T. Rose" <mrose@dbc.mtview.ca.us>
- cc: "Jim Gettys" <jg@pa.dec.com>, "Discuss Apps" <discuss@apps.ietf.org>, brunner@nic-naa.net
> what happened exactly in 93? in general, once you start winning, it's hard > to stop winning... In 1993 I started working on what became Spec 1170, with Locus, for IBM and HP. This was driven by the loss of share to Microsoft, and a realignment of the vendors from their prior constallatons (X/Open vs UI, Hamilton Group vs AT&T+SMI, NFS vs AFS, ...), to their with- or against-Redmond (modern) set of alignments (and consolidations). We (the Unix industry) had stopped winning, by 1993 IBM was in serious difficulty, and both IBM and HP were forward-minded about the conversion of their core businesses to hardware plus Windows aftermarkets. We killed SunWin and some other good ideas, established CDE, tried for shrinkwrap (via ANDF), and failed. I concure with Jim that the instutionalization of X in '88 (of "Unix" in '85) into vendor consortia was marred by insufficient "enlightened self-interest" by the vendor consortia members, most of whom are now trading at pennies on the dollar. Eric
Received on Saturday, 1 December 2001 00:32:36 UTC