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Alpha Can Live Without Microsoft
Joe Vigneau writes "The Boston Globe has an article that says the Alpha, even now that Microsoft will no longer support it, won't dissappear off the face of the earth. Here's one quote: 'The market has basically been pretty clear that the market for us is the Linux space,' Borkowski said."
Don't blame Compaq for making a smart (but belated) business decision. NT on Alpha wasn't selling well (some estimates place it as low as a mere 5% of Alpha sales). Compaq was spending millions of dollars a year in development of Alpha NT. If the 100 people who were let go were each making only $75,000 a year, plus benefits, then Compaq will probably save close to 10 million dollars a year on this alone. Compaq was also spending millions of dollars a year in advertising Alpha NT. They obviously spent much more on advertising for Alpha NT than they did for Linux Alpha, OpenVMS and Tru64 put together (based on what I've seen for page count, placement and number of publications), and got far less return. Even if they retarget some of those advertising dollars to other Alpha OSes, they should see a significantly better return on those advertising dollars.
Blame MS for shooting themselves in the foot. No more NT/Alpha means no more "Scalablity Days" and no more even pretending they can compete in the midrange until they get a working Merced OS out.
Of course, Microsoft self-destruction should be popular around here.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
If by "most NT users" you mean workstation users, you're right. However, the big sell for a chip like Alpha is on the server side, and there are/were plenty of Alpha NT server apps. Such as MS Back Office, which probably accounts for 50%+ of NT server installations.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
How do you measure that Alpha NT "wasn't selling well" when every NT CDROM that I have ever seen included the binaries for i386 and Alpha. I suppose the shipped-with-OS count does matter, but once a retail boxed NT is sold, what hardware it gets installed on is up to the purchaser.
Granted, probably very few copies of Windows NT sold at BestBuy end up on Alpha systems.
You've got it completely backward. Your argument matters from Microsoft's perspective, but not from Compaq's. What matters to them is how many Alphas they are selling to run NT. Compaq probably makes negligible money when they sell a copy of NT on any platform (Microsoft makes most of the money). If NT was only selling 5% of Alpha machines, then it was selling poorly on Alpha.
Many traditional Unix houses avoided Alpha systems for slower more expensive Unix machines from competitors because they took Digital's NT support as a sign that the company still didn't REALLY support Unix and might one day drop Unix support altogether.
Sun in particular stole away a lot of traditional Digital customers because they were the only major vendor that didn't pollute/dilute their message by playing around with NT. I think that HP and SGI both also suffered from confusing their traditional customers with mixed signals.
The move away from NT might give Tru64 Unix and perhaps even VMS a renewed respect in the industry.
I would agree, especially in shops that have traditionally been Digital shops. I think that if nothing else, this certainly will also give Linux the benefit of increased credibility.
If by "most NT users" you mean workstation users, you're right.
Well, I was specifically thinking of such things as high end CAD workstations. In server space, you are correct that app availability is far less of a problem (which is one reason that Linux is gaining much faster in the server arena than on the desktop). Unfortunately, there seems to be this perception amongst IT pointy haired bosses that you have to run your servers on the same type of hardware as your clients are on (which I know to be bogus since I've used RISC UNIX based machines as servers to disparate hardware UNIX boxes and PC's quite successfully). But the reality for a company like Compaq is that they are more likely to sell x86 based NT servers than Alpha based ones, especially when it is perceived that Alpha is expensive.
But the reality for a company like Compaq is that they are more likely to sell x86 based NT servers than Alpha based ones, especially when it is perceived that Alpha is expensive.
I always thought that Compaq should put an Alpha system in a nice beige Proliant rack case and call it something ike the Proliant 9000A - "the fastest Windows NT server" or something. IT Managers are otherwise falling over themselves to buy huge NT boxes, it's just that for some reason Alpha hardware has seemed unknown and scary.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The Alpha is a good chip, and I'm not surprised that they think it can survive on the Linux, *BSD and Dec Unix markets. Those three probably made up 99% of their sales, anyway.
But if they can get the chip to cost less, so that home users can afford it, we could be on the brink of a major revolt in the computer market. With no NT/9x there, Microsoft is closed out of any market Compaq forge for the Alpha. And if that market starts creeping into the home, that's going to cause a major shift in the industry.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The wording was a little off. NT 4.0 on Alpha was/is native. Using a software translation program from DEC, FX!32, you could run x86 Win32 programs on an Alpha NT 4.0 system. However, it was a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit chip. Alpha Linux (available from alot of folks like Red Hat and Debian and Suse to name a few) is 64-bit out of the box. Check out http://www.alpha-processor.com for their motherboards and vendors who sell them.
What's my Karma Mr. Burns? "Excellent"
I know everybody likes to trash Microsoft but there is another monopolist - Intel.
Let's face it, Intel have been pushing a technology that is over 15 years old.
Now that the Alpha seems to have assured support, hopefuly there is potentially SERIOUS competition to Intel (AMD produce great chips but when it comes to competing on price Intel have too much financial muscle to lose).
Why?
A) The Alpha has a superior design
B) Linux(or BSD) runs on it
C) Linux and associated applications port easily to other architectures
D) Alpha and linux are ideally matched for server and heavyweight computing/network uses.
E) The designs of both these products also result in stability.
There is a huge amount of potential with this combination and let's face it - makes computing interesting again!
Hey, if I can get an affordable computer, with a real OS, that will not fail me on bigfloat division and isn't uniquely branded, I'm ready to sign.
:)
www.pricewatch.com might be a good place to start looking.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
It's not a joke if you're landlocked on NT by software issues and need Alpha performance.
The problem being there is so little Alpha native software out there for NT that your situation describes only a very small number of people. Most NT users are landlocked by NT software that only ships on x86. FX!32 is only a partial solution because from what I've seen/read it makes an Alpha run converted applications at best only marginally faster than today's x86 boxes which are significantly cheaper. NT on Alpha, unfortunately wastes significant portions of the advantages of the Alpha processor due to it only running as 32-bit.
Well, technically NT is really VMS, and was therefore developed on the DEC VAX...
Well, VMS is definitely an ancestor of NT, but to say that NT is really VMS is really quite an insult to VMS. I've never been a VMS fan, personally, but in many ways it is still a superior OS to NT (stability, SMP scalability, clustering, real POSIX compliance, etc).
In my opinion it is more fair to say that NT would like to grow up some day and be half as capable of providing an enterprise ready environment as VMS does.
Since when is 'fsck' a dirty word, Mr. Oh-so-high-and-mighty Anonymous Coward?
Sheesh. Someone censors themselves, and they still get attitude from anal-retentive moral crusaders. That is pretty sad. Some people are just too damned easily offended. Maybe people need to be offended sometimes or their brains will shut off and they will quit thinking.
Compaq can also move their Tandem non-stop line onto the Alpha chip.
Can? I believe they already have in the Tandem Himalaya series. Or at least they are in the process of doing so.
I wonder what AMDs strategy is for dealing with Merced once it finally ships. It'll take them a while to clone it and they risk losing the momentum they've finally gained.
It would be kind of neat if AMD and Alpha Processor merged. They could share development costs and AMD would gain a 64-bit alternative to Merced. They might even be able to build hardware x86 emulation into the Alpha (although I'm not really sure that would be useful - maybe for Wine).
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow