Members Respond to Year-in-Review Poll
Few are ready to buy a car through the Internet
Each year at its January meeting, the Software Entrepreneurs'
Forum/UniForum Open Systems SIG asks a panel of industry experts
to review the year in open systems. We asked UniForum members
on our electronic mailing list to respond to the same questions
the panelists would be asked. Typically, their responses are
pithy, frank, and irreverent. Here's a sampling of what members
thought about this year's questions:
1. Who was 1994's most successful open systems entrepreneur?
Our members, divided on whether to mention a person or a company,
voted in equal numbers for:
- Sun Microsystems
- Sybase Senior Vice President and co-founder Bob Epstein,
along with Powersoft Corp. Chairman Mitchell Kertzman, for Sybase's
acquisition of Powersoft. One member nominated Kertzman "based
on the price he negotiated from Sybase in the recent merger."
Sybase, a relational database developer, announced in November
that it would take over Powersoft in an exchange of shares valued
at $915 million. Analysts saw the acquisition as an acknowledgment
by Sybase that it needed Powersoft's technology to build a comprehensive
tools portfolio. Sybase had been making smaller acquisitions
toward that goal.
Also getting votes were:
- Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, "who has most big-name application
developers believing that NT is an open system and rushing to
build applications for it," according to Barry Hedquist of Santa
Clara, CA.
- Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, the freeware UNIX look-alike
that runs on Intel and is increasingly popular with individual
users. Mark Elkins, Johannesburg, South Africa, said Torvalds
"has allowed many individuals to directly contribute to a really
lovely piece of software (operating system)."
2a. Who/what did the most for open systems in 1994?
X/Open Co. got the most votes, for its contributions to UNIX
unification, shepherding Spec 1170, and taking on the UNIX trademark
from Novell. Novell also got some credit for giving the UNIX
name to X/Open, but also was criticized on that score.
Other top vote-getters:
- Sun Microsystems for SunOS 5.2, Solaris 2.4, Wabi 2.0, and
SolarNet
- Hewlett-Packard. Lars Helgeson of Elmhurst, IL, said the
company has provided "powerful, scalable, reliable systems."
Also mentioned:
- UniForum, "by bringing up to date the information on the
state of the art in open systems technology," according to Mohand
Tafat, Cheraga Tipasa, Algeria.
- Pure Software
- Data General
- Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux
- OpenDoc, for challenging Microsoft's OLE and Cairo
- NCSA Mosaic
- Microsoft, for making TCP/IP available on Windows
- Silicon Graphics, "The highest profile of any UNIX company
to mainstream America due to Hollywood and cable efforts," according
to Jay Krone, Marlboro, MA.
2b. Who/what did the worst for open systems in 1994?
The runaway winner was Bill Gates and Microsoft, for trying to
pretend that Windows NT is an open system. Novell came in a strong
second for buying UNIX (in 1993), then not exploiting UnixWare
and-our members thought-generally twiddling its thumbs in the
open systems and UNIX arena.
Member Ed Niehaus, South San Francisco, CA, said Microsoft had
earned the title "by defining 'open' as being controlled by one
company but in an open process in which they ask people what
they want and then do what Microsoft intended all along."
Also mentioned were:
- The lack of comprehensive distributed systems management
- The lack of open systems vendor cooperation.
- The Common Open Software Environment process and other standards
efforts for failing to live up to promises
- The Open Software Foundation and "the DCE crowd"
3. What are your favorite two open systems products to have been
released in 1994?
Our members came up with a long list, with no single product
getting more than a few votes. Top vote-getter was NCSA Enhanced
Mosaic, the World-Wide Web browser that has made the WWW the
hottest Internet venue going.
Other products receiving more than one vote were:
- SunOS 5.2 and Solaris 2.4
- Linux
- PowerPC systems
- NetScape, the WWW browser released by NetScape Communications
Corp., which also made the number 3 position on Time magazine's
list of the "Best Products of 1994."
4. What are the winning factors for selling high-end UNIX servers
to replace legacy systems or do new applications?
Members thought price/performance was by far the most important
factor. Ed Niehaus said he voted for "Price/performance and a
level of reliability equal to that of the mainframe systems that
are being phased out; also, compatibility with existing LANs
and other systems."
Other factors getting multiple votes were:
- Networking and communication capabilities
- Ease of use, robustness, and fault-tolerance
- Scalability
Also mentioned were interoperability, portability, development
tools, distributed applications and data access capability, acceptance
of DCE by users and developers, and more CPU power.
5. Will massively parallel UNIX systems ever do order entry and
payroll processing applications?
Most members said "yes" with qualifications, with about a 70
percent "yes" vote. Sample replies:
- "Yes, if you consider NASDAQ an order entry system," said
Mike MacFaden, Fremont, CA.
- "Yes, by 1999 for sure," said Ed Niehaus.
Member Jay Krone said he believes order entry will come sooner,
payroll later. "Order entry applications can be written in a
distributed manner appropriate to MPP systems," he said. "Payroll
applications, on the other hand, tend to be batch-oriented and
single-threaded-more appropriate for a small number of big processors
(mainframes/-superminis) instead of a big number of small processors
(MPP)."
Others thought the market would be too small, or that it would
cost too much for a company to adopt such a UNIX application,
or both.
6. When will you be willing to pay for your next automobile by
sending a supposedly encoded credit card number to your dealer's
World-Wide Web page?
Our members almost unanimously considered this a poor question.
It supposes two unlikely situations, they said: first that a
buyer would normally pay for a car with a credit card, which
hardly anyone does even in person due to high credit card interest
rates and credit limits; second, that there would be any convenience
to paying over the Internet for an item that the purchaser would
normally want to test drive, and then pick up in person from
the dealer.
Sample responses:
- "When Hell freezes over."-Tim Ottinger, Champaign, IL.
- "This question is weird."-Cynthia Typaldos, Saratoga, CA.
- "Never on an open line."-Tim Witham, Beaverton, OR.
- "1996."-Faye Briggs, San Jose, CA.
- "When I have so much money that I don't mind buying cars
for the cyberpunks too."-Clark Brown, Dallas, TX.
- "On the same day the car comes out my workstation."-Barry
Hedquist.
- "I'm still waiting for my pizza!"-Mark Elkins, Johannesburg,
South Africa.
A better question, most agreed, is when we will be paying for
smaller, less expensive, mailable items via the Web. In that
case, the answer is an emphatic "soon."
Yet another viewpoint came from Ed Niehaus, who said, "More interesting
is when the retailers and the credit card clearinghouses will
be satisfied that they know who just made the $20,000 purchase,
and be willing to send off the goods based on some numbers keyed
into a Mosaic form."
7. What opportunities stand out for UniForum members for software
development-i.e., what products and services are missing from
the current array?
Member opinions were spread across a wide range of products and
services, with 33 separate categories mentioned. The top vote-getter
was the category of systems management, integrated systems and
network management, and enterprise administration products.
Others with multiple votes:
- Better networking applications, integration of open systems
with LANs, network control and monitoring, and getting Macs and
PCs connected with internets.
- Standard object-oriented toolsets
- Standard UNIX-wide APIs and file transfer APIs
- Excellent desktop office applications
- End-user tools that don't require programming