By Cedric Braun
The Unix community must continue its efforts to maintain momentum toward standardization and its preeminence in the open systems industry, according to Lew Platt, president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard. In his opening-day keynote address to an audience of over 2,200 on Wednesday, Platt challenged the UniForum '96 attendees to strengthen their focus on customer needs and "find new ways of delivering on the value propositions" that have made Unix a success.
The four Unix value propositions that Platt discussed were its technical excellence as an enabling technology; the choice of running on more microprocessor architectures that any other operating system; its adaptability, portability and interoperability; and the thousands of applications it supports. "In short," he said, "Unix has made possible distributed computing."
He emphasized that these benefits have "made this technology more successful than any of us would have imagined just a decade ago." He went on to say, "Without Unix and its advocates, there would have been no Internet, no World Wide Web and no glimpse of the information superhighway."
Platt also asserted that Unix has changed the nature of computing and that its impact can be seen in two related phenomena: the open enterprise and the information infrastructure. In elaboration, he said that the most fundamental contribution of Unix to customers has been to help them to evolve their proprietary legacy systems into flexible IT architectures, which allow the users "to address today's business challenges while simultaneously preparing their organizations for an uncertain future."
Having articulated the apparent paradox that "standardized interfaces encourage innovative implementations" and touting this as one of Unix's most important contributions to IT, Platt entered into one of the centerpieces of his address: the Information Utility. Using the analogy of the electric plug, he said that if we tried to draw the computing equivalent of this concept, the role of the plug "would be played by portability interfaces like UNIX '95 and interoperability interfaces such as X.25 or TCP/IP." As with the plug, he argued that these standards have made it possible to "innovate on either side of the interface."
Platt offered his listeners both a look back and a look ahead. At one point, he was joined by Intel CEO Andy Grove in a realtime video conference over the Internet. Both men reminisced about past UniForum keynotes they had delivered--Platt in 1988 and Grove in 1994--in which they had warned about threats to the viability of Unix systems, including having too many incompatible versions of the operating system, vendor infighting and a sluggish standards process. They agreed that Unix had successfully overcome those challenges and has continued to thrive. Platt added that Unix has experienced growth far beyond what he had optimistically predicted in his previous keynote.
Taking a metaphor from Grove's speech of two years ago, Platt insisted, "Instead of fortifying fortress Unix, we must build bridges." He ended his remarks by discussing how the Unix community can continue to balance "two very legitimate forces--competition and collaboration." Competition can help customers, because it creates innovation aimed at their emerging needs. Collaboration can also be good for customers, because it drives consensus toward a set of standard, transparent software interfaces. Platt concluded that this cycle of competition, innovation, collaboration and consensus "raises the bar" and moves technology forward.