Jesper Frimann (jesperfrimann@gmail.com) on 8/22/08 wrote:
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>Yes I know that feeling, but when you drill down into those people what U'll find is that
>much of that 'resistance to change', read one of my wife's books on psychology to learn that
>phrase, is just that. Resistance to change.

Exactly--resistance to change.

At present, there are _many_ smaller shops which use commodity x86/linux exclusively. When the time comes for those places to buy their first "big box", I suspect many of them will choose a larger x86/linux machine, if that's an option, rather than buying proprietary hardware. By doing so, they would not only retain something they're familiar with, but would also not need to hire other administrators etc.

I suspect that x86 will initially encroach into big iron in those shops which used commodity x86 previously and are buying a "big box" for the first time.

As a result, the proprietary architectures may lose the market of "initial big box buyers" to x86, when it can scale up sufficiently. So x86 could capture a significant part of the "big box" market owing to new installations, even if none of the established players migrated from proprietary hardware.

>I'd rather change from running Oracle on HPUX to Solaris than I'd change from running DB2 on HPUX to
>running Oracle on HPUX, just to mention a fictive example.

That I'll certainly grant. Everyplace I've worked, migrating from Solaris to linux would have been fairly trivial, but migrating off Oracle would have been utterly impossible. It frightens me to even think about that. In some places, a non-trivial fraction of their application was written as Oracle stored procedures.

I was told by someone who worked for Oracle that they used to maintain "bug compatibility" between versions of Oracle for different architectures. In other words, if there was a bug in the reference version of Oracle (the solaris version) then they would purposefully introduce exactly the same bug and exactly the same erroneous behavior into the versions for the other architectures, so as to assure that Oracle worked identically on all platforms.

>Well the highend server game is a totally different game. And if x86 wants to enter
>this space it needs to gain many of the same features as the processors that play in
>that space has. Furthermore the whole solution stack also have to be able to support
>'highend server features' and not to forget the people running the servers.

That I'll grant. But, doesn't it seem possible that some players will build high-end x86 boxes with those features?

When I started off as a programmer, Sun boxes were workstations for hackers. Sun had no enterprise strategy. IIRC, Sun started dominating the enterprise with the E10000 which was a design they purchased from someone else.

Within a few years, Sun boxes were what everyone had to have when they bought big iron.

If sparc could make that transition, then why not x86.

>Well the x86 game is Intel and then some smallish vendors that are struggling (sorry AMD).
>And much of the innovation that you see on the box side of x86 servers are things that have
>been copied from RISK/Itanium/Mainframe. The main innovation of the x86 server is the price, and
>that have strictly speaking also been done before.

That's true. On the bright side, the previous tech monopolies (like IBM) lavished money on R&D. They were very innovative. In fact, IIRC, many of the innovations copied in x86 servers originally came from the IBM 360, including virtual memory, timesharing, and many other things. Perhaps, if Intel gains a comparable monopoly then they'll spend alot on research like IBM did.

>And with Intel trying hard to grab more and more of the infrastructure inside servers...
>IMHO we are heading back to a world I personally don't care much for. And if that happens
>I will either go back to software development or perhaps start that microbrewery that I've
>been dreaming about.

Making processors is so capital-intensive and so R&D-heavy, that it may be a natural monopoly. It would be difficult to envision a competitor emerging against Intel.

The unfortunate thing about AMD is that they're not really doing anything wrong. They're just not big enough. AMD could only survive when Intel management was making silly mistakes, and AMD could exploit those mistakes. Since Intel management isn't making silly mistakes right now (quite the opposite), AMD is having a tough time of it.