Editorial

The Plight of Unix: Is It a Lost Cause? Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. by Jonah McLeod

In her book The Celts , Nora Chadwick, a scholar of Celtic culture, describes the history of the Celts and their final subjugation by the Roman Empire under Julius Caesar. The Celts fell because they were a collection of disparate and independent tribes that couldn't form a unified front against the vastly better-organized, highly disciplined Romans. There's a lesson here for the fiercely competitive computer industry.

From its inception, support for the Unix operating system has consisted of warring factions each ardently loyal to its variant of the OS. The original Unix 5 from AT&T Bell Labs battled for market acceptance with Unix BSD, a free version developed at the University of California at Berkeley. Then each major workstation vendor implemented its own version of the operating system.

Commercial Unix implementations with a large following in scientific and engineering computing include SunOS and then Solaris from Sun Microsystems and HP-UX from Hewlett-Packard. Solaris has been widely adopted in the Internet server market, as well as in client-server computing for corporate information systems. These computing environments have become battlegrounds, with one invading force--Microsoft, the Roman Empire of software--seeking to rule all of them.

If history predicts the future, better-funded, highly organized Microsoft will succeed because it has no significant united opposition. Hewlett-Packard is pursuing a strategy of appeasement. Relinquish PC applications in which Unix workstations aren't price-competitive to Microsoft and target computationally intensive applications with their higher-value workstations. Yeah, right!

As for Sun, it believes it can bankroll Java into a computing language that can overwhelm Microsoft in Internet territory. Dream on! Moreover, Sun appears ready to surrender the scientific and engineering markets, where it has held sway for so long, to Microsoft without a fight. Beavis and Butthead battle Bill Gates.

At a recent event to promote Windows NT as the OS for enterprise computing, held in Redmond, Wash., Gates hosted, among others, Aart de Geus, Synopsys 's president and CEO. Earlier, Synopsys had pledged to port its EDA tools to NT this year. Sun's management should feel sufficiently threatened to take some action. But so far Sun has stood idly by as NT-based PCs have successfully challenged its systems on price/performance in simulation tool benchmarks, which we published in the March issue. And it will certainly take another hit in synthesis tool benchmarks that we'll publish in July.

The message couldn't be clearer. Intel and Microsoft want to kick Sun and everyone else out of the scientific and engineering market. Hello? Does anyone care?

Our readers, the designers using EDA tools and workstations, seem to. Responding to my previous editorials asking their OS preference, they almost unanimously chose Unix, even if they had to use a PC.

If the scientific and engineering market falls to the Intel-Microsoft juggernaut, the rest of the computing world, especially the more lucrative Internet server market, won't be far behind. You'd think that the one company with some influence in this market, Netscape Communications, would want to take action.

From the text of Netscape's 1996 10-Q filing comes the following quote. Netscape "believes that Microsoft has attempted to create competitive advantages for its browser and server products by bundling these products with its operating systems." No fooling!

So far Netscape's only counterattack has been to sue Microsoft. That's a lame strategy at best given the failures others suffered trying to win in court what they lost in the market. For Netscape, the solution seems simple. The Internet community has already adopted the Linux operating system for PC servers; why not buy the Linux operating system and sell it bundled with Netscape software just as Microsoft is bundling NT? With a major software company like Netscape behind Linux on a PC, EDA tool vendors would be encouraged to offer a port of their tools to Linux, something they're unwilling to do now. If you think this is a good idea, let me know via e-mail (jonah@isdmag.com) and I'll post your comments on our Web site for all to see.

Finally, consider the world of computing 10 years from now. If you can see Microsoft software pervasive throughout the landscape, ask yourself if that's what you want. If it isn't, then you should do something about it; otherwise, you'll suffer the fate of the Celts, a people with a history recounted by their conqueror.

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please email your message to miker@isdmag.com.

integrated system design  June 1998