Posts by None-of-the-Above

I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square

If "fair and square" means fracking your partners, then yes

Interesting. This is not quite what I remember. First, IBM and Microsoft convinced Lotus (and also Word Perfect, the other "big kahuna" of the DOS PC era) to spend all their development cash on OS/2 versions of their products. As good partners, both did just that - having ports running on OS/2 by 1989, but without the Windows-style interfaces. Secondly, IBM and Microsoft divorced, followed by the Softies announcing Windows 3 as their only strategy, coupled with their intent to move Excel and Word to that platform exclusively (no OS/2 versions). This left Lotus with a hard choice - stay with IBM and OS/2, or move to Windows 3 and partner with Microsoft, which had the leading competitive product. Having by that point built a working version of Lotus 123 with full OS/2 Presentation Manager (PM) capability, this was the equivalent of telling Lotus "please throw out 3 years of development effort and start over."

Remember that the OS/2 version of Lotus 123 COULD NOT BE EASILY PORTED to Windows. OS/2 software was based on an assumption of a pre-emptive multitasking OS, which Windows 3 was not. Also PM and Windows were quite different on the UI as well. So not only would Lotus have to change the UI over from PM to Windows, it would also have to rework the core code to work under Windows 3 w/o proper multi-tasking. Once it became clear that Windows was going to be the customers' direction, however, Lotus faced the inevitable and built a Windows 3 version, but only after MS had built a big head start convincing customers to migrate to Windows 3 with Excel and Word.

That was when the final blow was applied by Microsoft. By the early 1990's, both Lotus and WordPerfect had working versions of their flagship products running on Windows 3; two years late, but good products. This was when Microsoft announced "Microsoft Office", meaning that they were giving liberal allowances for competitive upgrades from either Lotus or WordPerfect to get both Excel AND Word for Windows. Hard for the competition to match that, given their overall higher price, their need to recover both the OS/2 and the Windows development investments, and that they were by then cash starved because of loss of market share to Microsoft.

Was Lotus "lazy"? No. Did it put too much trust in its partners IBM and Microsoft - decide for yourself. Do I blame Microsoft? Of course not - taking strategic advantage of your partners appears to be how all tech companies operate. Microsoft has just been so much better at it down the years.

Frack me! UK shale gas bonanza 'bigger than North Sea oil'

Who will take her place?

Where is the new Joe Grant? We need someone attractive to distract our once and future Silurian overlords.

SAP buys Sybase - but why?

It's all about mobile capablity

Please ignore the database side of this. The current SAP suite of products is only supported by 4 DMBS vendors - IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP itself (MaxDB, which has a fairly long history as ADABAS-D to SAPDB to MaxDB, but I digress). Notice that Sybase IS NOT a supported DBMS - this according to the current PAM (Platform Availability Matrix).

SAP is in need of a way to strategically support mobile connectivity to their solution. While mobile solutions for SAP have been available for nearly a decade (back to the Palm 7, if not earlier), it's a bigger need in today's market to have a strategic mobile solution, given the expected growth rate of mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android, iPAD, etc. In fact, SAP flushed much of their internal-only mobile solution in favour of partnering a few years back; Sybase was one of these partners - http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1065930.

I am not saying this will be easy, or that Sybase will even remain a DBMS vendor; being a development partner with SAP may however have given the latter enough understanding of Sybase's technical capability for SAP to put up the funding to lock them in. Given that the Sybase DBMS is not supported for SAP applications, neither IBM or Microsoft are likely to complain much. I think we all know how much Oracle's opinion would matter here, as well.

The comments about the UI earlier are also on target, assuming the UI for the Sybase solution is a mobile one. The creation of effective mobile UI's was an area where SAP struggled with previous generations of mobile offerings. All fits, at least to me.

HP iron still haunted by ghost of Compaq

Makes Sense to Me

Contrary to Matt's comments about Itanium's importance, I view this as both Sun and HP confirming the increasing dominance of commodity hardware. The author is correct in highlighting Sun's about-face on resurrecting Solaris on x64, where it can continue to live on - independent of the fate of SPARC as a CPU architecture.

As to HP Integrity's recent up quarter, that likely has much to do with PA-RISC customers refreshing 5 year old soon-to-be-obsolete PA boxen with the latest generation of HP-UX Itanium gear, under pressure from HP (due to their likely use of escalating maintenance fees to encourage migration over to Itanic-TNG). Will be interesting to see what happens over the entire 2009 period.

I find large ISV software benchmarks to be useful when cutting through the fog in these types of discussions - SAP's 2-tier SD Benchmark being one of the best for me (found here: http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/sd.epx ). SAP boils down benchmark performance to "SAPS", handy for making comparisons. One of the more interesting comparisons is as follows ( ["benchmark number"] ): [200683] HP rx6600-8Core / HPUX=10,780 SAPS / versus / [2007040] HP rx6600-8Core / Win2K3 Svr=8,680 SAPS / versus / [2007034] HP DL585-8Core-AMD / Win2k3 Svr=10,500 SAPS. This shows two things - (1) that the DL585 (AMD x64) almost equals the rx6600 (Itanium) in terms of benchmark performance while likely costing significantly less, and (2) that the SAME rx6600 SERVER loses 19.5% of its performance value when running the non-HP-UX workload. So much for the "synergy" of being able to run both HP-UX and Windows together on Itanium. Why pay more to consolidate workloads onto Itanium, if it also means accepting lower price/performance?

The second interesting comparison would be between these three benchmarks: [2008021] Sun T5240-16Core / Solaris=20,090 SAPS / versus / [2008033] SunBlade x8440-16Core-AMD / Solaris=17,850 SAPS / versus / [2008016] HP BL685c-16Core-AMD / Win2k3 Svr=17,650 SAPS. First, the 16 core UltraSPARC T2 Plus CPUs drive slightly better results (12.5%) than the AMD CPUs when running Solaris. Second, the SunBlade running Solaris is roughly equal to a similar HP Blade server running Win2k3 Server. Thus as long as Sun can crank out SPARC CPUs that beat the commodity CPUs, they can justifiy keeping SPARC around; at the same time, having Solaris running on as many x64 vendor products as possible gives them a "Plan B" HP doesn't have at this point for HP-UX.

In short, Sun now has two different OS strategies going: (1) running Solaris-for-x64 , Linux, and Windows Server on their commodity-CPU servers, and (2) enabling Solaris-for-x64 to run on all the key commodity vendor platforms from their competitors, along with Solaris-for-SPARC on their own and Fujitsu's SPARC-based machines. You can fault their logic, but arguing that Itanium should be a part of that picture makes as much sense as IBM resurrecting its AIX port to Itanic. Itanium is effectively now the same kind of "niche" product as IBM's Power architecture; and as Intel and AMD continue the current "core wars", the niches will get narrower.

Which brings me to my last point. As we move up to Power and Itanium CPUs with 4, 6, or 8 Cores competing with AMD and XEON commodity CPUs having similar configurations, it will be all about how the OS effectively leverages that power, not the instruction set (EPIC's VLIW approach now appears to be quite "quaint" from my perspective; a product of a bygone era). So for the Solaris haters out there, I would like to remind you how much experience SUN has built by scaling their OS over lots and lots of CPU cores/threads over the past 10 or so years. Their porting of Solaris to x64 may not save SPARC, but it just might save Solaris, which may be the only OS on commodity CPU servers with extensive commercial experience with large-scale SMP (32 to 64 Cores) for the next couple of years. Windows Server 2008 will have this capability and experience eventually, but not for a while; same with Linux (not talking "theoretical" scalability here; how many Windows and Linux severs in actual use today exceed 4 CPU sockets, thus limiting them to 16 CPU cores?). Meanwhile, I doubt that either HP-UX or AIX take this route; this issue is a major differentiator for both vendors until Windows and Linux catch up.

"Alien" because I don't work for either HP or SUN.