A look at events in the IT industry in Japan and abroad
UNIX is Dead: Long Live UNIX
by John BoydNot too many months ago, that venerable old operating system, UNIX, seemed headed for superannuation. Despite an end to their divisive UNIX wars, the various UNIX suppliers continued to carry the baggage of what has made their systems different from each other. They appeared incapable of agreeing on a practical commonality, despite a number of valiant attempts to bring the factions together under a unified system.
Worse still, Microsoft -- with its big, beady eyes fixed lustfully on expanding control beyond PC computing, to the entire corporate enterprise -- had released a much-improved upgrade of its own 32-bit, multitasking operating system, Windows NT 3.5. The upgrade garnered wide industry publicity and user interest.
The pendulum swings
Ominously, some trade periodicals began to drop UNIX from their titles, turning instead to fuzzy phrases like "Open Systems" as a way to include NT in their coverage. General magazines like Byte, meanwhile, published stories that foretold the looming death of UNIX. No surprise, then, that many judged the future of UNIX to lie at the bottom of an iconized trash can belonging to Microsoft.So why, then, are UNIX system sales suddenly taking off like the Space Shuttle? Digital, HP, and IBM, for instance, have reported jumps in sales of 70%, 60%, and 40%, respectively, over the past year. One answer is that, with all the corporate restructuring and downsizing now going on, UNIX -- given its robustness and maturity -- has become the system of choice for client/server-based systems running mission critical functions.
Another factor is the Internet. UNIX-based servers are the first choice for the vast majority of corporations eager to stake out a claim on the Net. According to Tokyo-based Internet access providers Cyber Technologies International and Global OnLine Japan, UNIX has become the standard for the Internet in Japan and the US because of its industrial-strength architecture and rich features.
Of course, this advantage is temporary: rival systems manufacturers are already shipping their own improved Internet offerings. According to Apple Computer's David Nagel, Apple has quickly zoomed to the no. 2 spot in the vendor sales table for Internet servers, on the strength of its ease of use. Nevertheless, UNIX suppliers like Sun and Silicon Graphics are well placed to exploit the corporate interest in the Net in both the US and Japan.
Change of hands,
change of strategy
UNIX's recent change of ownership -- when the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO)
took it off Novell's hands -- could open up more blue skies (though, equally,
it could create thunderstorms, depending on how other UNIX vendors feel
about licensing the OS from its new owners). Novell had previously acquired
UNIX from the UNIX System Laboratory (established by AT&T, the originator
of UNIX) as one of a series of hasty buys in the early '90s, to counter
Microsoft's growing dominance on the desktop. But Novell, king of networking
with its NetWare operating system, positioned UNIX (renamed UnixWare) to
go head-to-head with Windows on the desktop, an unlikely strategy even before
it was launched. Now Novell is keen to get back to concentrating on networking, and to stop NT from making further gains there at its expense. So it gratefully entered into a complicated alliance with SCO and HP that could give UNIX a further shot in the silicon. The goal of the alliance, according to executives of the three companies (who made the announcement in Tokyo this September) is to merge SCO's Intel-based UNIX with UnixWare and segments of NetWare, thereby creating "a high volume UNIX system" for sale in 1997.
Moreover, HP will develop a 64-bit implementation that incorporates its own version of UNIX, together with the upcoming SCO mix of UNIX and NetWare. This is slated for 1998, and will run on the future P7-generation chips (that Intel and HP are currently developing) which combine the architectures of Intel's x86 and HP's PA RISC microprocessors.
And speaking of 64-bits, some 50 major UNIX vendors -- in yet another attempt to unify the market -- recently endorsed a common 64-bit application programming interface for the next generation of UNIX systems. The move is supported by Japanese vendors, including Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC. According to Bernard Guidon, head of HP's workstation business, this means software developers will be able to write just one application that will run on all 64-bit UNIX platforms. The move should help keep UNIX ahead of Microsoft, which is still busy consolidating its 32-bit NT system.
Unless they have learned nothing from history, and choose to shoot themselves in the foot yet again, UNIX vendors now appear to have a product that has a future just as long its past. Long live UNIX!ç
John Boyd is the Tokyo correspondent for Information Week and writes the weekly Computer Corner column in the Japan Times, but is otherwise available for hire if the fee is fat. He detests e-mail, though, so while you can bug him at 6840615@mcimail.com, don't expect an electronic reply!
