Conference 7.286::digital

    Of course Win32 is turning hardware into a commodity.  However, lots of
    people can compete on speed.  This includes Motorola, Intel, IBM.  Each
    one of these companies has more FAB and Engineers than Digital.
    
    The folks without fabs are concentrating on SOLUTIONS.  To paraphrase
    clinton, "Its the solution, stupid".  What are we concentrating on.
    
    

  Also, it's not at all painless to add extra binaries to a software
  package, even if there's room on the CD.

  Among other problems, there's the slight issue of testing and
  support. Unless there's a large installed base, *I* wouldn't
  spend *MY* company's money supporting a particular hardware
  platform.  Chicken <--> Egg.
                                   Atlant

    Software development for Win95 and Win NT is making Software companies
    stick with Win32 which is not tied to a hardware architecture. This 
    means that a simple re-compilation will produce both Intel and Alpha 
    programs. 
    *
    * It's not just a simple matter of re-compilation and the application 
    * is now accessible on Windows NT/Alpha.  The single item that is
    * keeping vendors from porting is SUPPORT.  Once the application is 
    * available will the volume justify the structure to support the
    * product?  With 80M Intel platforms, getting a small percentage still
    * is volume.  With Alpha, if you had every system you still don't have
    * the market share of an Intel environment.
    *
    * However, 1800 applications is a pretty good portfolio.  There appears
    * to 5000 native Alpha application so Intel constitutes approximately 
    * 36% of the applications.  Not bad.
    *

    
    
    
       Playing devils advocate here, Alpha NT machines are the fastest
    around. However; whats becoming more important in a commodity type
    market is performance for the dollar. Here is where Alpha with NT
    can loose. Risc code requires more memory to run in. Generally speaking
    Alpha NT boxes must be configured with much more memory to support NT
    itself and any recompiled apps.
    
    With a 200Mhz Pentium coming this summer with P6 (and P7)-  Alpha NT boxes
    are getting major competition. Having the fastest best box isnt the
    thing most companies usually want if they have to pay double for it.
    This is a commodity type market (I had to say it again).
   
 
     Frankly I'm worried!

     Did'nt mean to rain on anybodies parade
   
     Wayne V
    
    

    Check out Dell Computer. They have been selling Pentium Pro systems for
    about six weeks or so.
    
    	<http://www.dell.com/>
    
    

    My major cusotmer is moving from Alpha unix application servers to
    Intel NT boxes. It will take more total number of servers, but they
    will save lots of money  on the Pentium systems.
    
    For the present, we still get the Unix database servers, thanks to the
    Turbolaser.
    
    I hope no one is counting on Alpha NT sales to save this company.

    Re: .5
    
    PentiumPro systems have been available for months from different
    vendors, including Digital.
    
    However, we've only offered a PentiumPro workstation (Celebris XL
    6150, 6180 and 6200) line so far (with servers coming up, though).
    
    ...petri

    The basenoter is optimistic because he was born in Canada. Please
    forgive him.
    
    ;^)

    Intergraph has been shipping multiprocessor PPro systems for about 3
    months primarily because they uncovered the bug in Intel's chip and
    designed a workaround on the motherboard. They told Intel about the bug
    but not how to fix it.