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Cringely on StarOffice, W2k, Alpha & more
Shturmovik[KGB] gave us the
hook-up for the latest piece by Cringely. Bob does what columnists are supposed to do-ties together all the disparate news that's been happening and makes a convincing argument about a certain-company being off the tracks.
They've been trying ever since the browser wars, with no success. Remember MSN? Neither do I. Then there's Hotmail, (what security hole?) and Ebay (sinusoidal behavior makes its debut on the Internet). The big players to be taken seriously on the Internet do not include Microsoft. They've failed miserably because the rules of the game have changed, and they're stuck with what made them what they are.
As Cringley's well-written article points out, the MS strategy no longer applies. Close standards which take advantage of market forces (PCs becoming the dominant hardware standard) is one thing when the technology is a stand-alone box. When the technology hinges upon the Internet, ie communication between many people, closed standards will always be ignored for open ones. It's simply the nature of the environment.
For MS to reinvent itself enough to survive in the Internet Age, they must inevitably abandon all that has made them profitable. Money is the only thing keeping the company in the game, it certainly isn't technological or innovative prowess. Their current dominance in office productivity software will not save them, Star Office being offered free will do to them what they did to Netscape (what sweet irony it is). Even better yet, a coordinated triumverate between StarOffice, WordPerfect Suite, and Applixware will but speed up the process. It is simply a matter of time before the Darwinian nature of the industry makes Microsoft the dinosaur of the PC industry.
I've just done a 2 day intro course on these products and based on what I've learned I'd have
/etc/binlog.conf shows:
../cluster/members/{memb}/etc/binlog.conf
:-)
to say that chucking out the Tru64 kernel and replacing it with Linux is IMO not yet an option.
This is the biggest leap in technology that Tru64 has made during it's life so far, and the jewel in the crown for V5 has got to be the new filesystem, CFS (Cluster File System).
With CFS, not only can every system in the cluster see all the devices on the shared SCSI bus, but also all the devices on all the private SCSI buses too. When one system mounts a device, this appears in the mount table for all the cluster members.
The thing is that CFS is bound so closely to UNIX V5 and the kernel, that even on a standalone V5 system with no clustering there are tell tale signs that dormant cluster software is waiting with hooks at the ready. You can see this in the file system. For example an ls -l of
binlog.conf ->
Btw, {memb} is something new too. It's called a CDSL (context dependant symbolic link) and in this case resolves to "member0", changing the number where the cluster member number is different.
While I'm at this I can't resist telling you how clusters are installed, cos this was really neat too.
When installing a cluster you start off with one disk, which can be either local or shared, and install Tru64 UNIX on that. Then install the TruCluster software and select two disks on the shared SCSI, one for the Cluster disk and one for the system (member0) boot disk. When you run "clu_create" Tru64 UNIX is copyied from your current disk to the cluster disk and the boot disk containing the root f/s for member0. You then shutdown and boot of the boot disk. Hey presto, you're a 1 system cluster. The first disk you used can be junked now and reused for something else.
Want to add more members? No problem. You need to assign boot disks for each one, then run clu_add_member for each system. A system specific root is added to each, and member specific directories are setup on the common Cluster Disk. At this point you could take all your new systems out of their boxes, cable them up (though in practice you'd have done this first) power them on and then boot them straight off their new boot disks. No installation needed
The whole process is so quick we reckoned we could install and cluster of 4 x DS20's from scratch in about 1.5 hours.
I could ramble on now about the new System Management Station, that can be driven from a curses front end, a CDE GUI front end, or even a Java version of the CDE GUI from a Web browser. I could wax lyrical about the dynamicly updated pictorial system maps of the systems, their devices, buses, cluster members, etc, the new Event Manager, and lots of other things. But I reckon I've taken up enough of your time.
To wrap up I'd like to say that I think it would be very cool (and cost effective in the long term) if the Linux kernel could replace Tru64's. But I don't see that happening just yet, not for the next couple of years anyway.
Macka
Over the next couple of years Microsoft's earnings growth and margins are sure to decline for the reasons Cringley outlined, but look for Gates to reinvent Microsoft as an on-line media company.
Even if Microsoft loses the Internet server and home user markets (although they'll eventually drop personal use Windows license prices - to zero if necessary), they'll have the business and office application markets for a long time as a cash cow. They also have a *huge* warchest.
If you look at all of Microsoft's cable aquisitions (some 20-30 investments - incl. the recent $600M or so in Rogers), the battle they appear to be starting to get in with AOL, and Gate's long standing desire to get into the "razorblade" business, you can see pretty clearly where they are headed...