Beyond the generic description of ‘computer maker’ there appears to be little in common, at first glance anyway, between Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems. The former is, first and foremost, a personal computer company having made its reputation developing machines that set the standard for ease of use and subsequently followed by the rest of the industry.
Sun, on the other hand, has long been the darling of the high-powered technical user, either with the engineering workstations with which it initially made its reputation, or the servers with which it claimed it ‘put the dot in dot.com’.
True, both companies have pursued a resolutely independent path when compared with other computer makers. Whereas most of its PC rivals have always been in the ‘Wintel’ camp, Apple has stuck to its guns with alternative microprocessors from Motorola and/or IBM and has maintained the core development of its own operating system.
Sun too has remained dogged in its determination to base its machines around its own Sparc processor designs, even as it watched all of its rivals in the Unix server market gradually adopt the Intel architecture to power some or all of their products.
Where the two companies are defiantly occupying common ground that many others have been happy to leave is in their espousal of proprietary Unix systems. Apple’s OSX, to which it has migrated over the past few years, is based on a core of BSD Unix and Sun’s Solaris has long been the leading commercial flavour of Unix in terms of commercial units shipped.
A week or so either side of Christmas, both companies launched major publicity drives in Europe to extol the virtues of their respective offerings: Sun with its Sun Network Conference in Berlin last December and Apple the following month in Paris, where it announced its latest XServe rack-mounted servers running the latest version of OSX.
Does the world need another proprietary Unix offering? The evidence of the last few years would suggest that it does not; that whereas the security and reliability of Unix is greatly to be desired, the high cost associated with acquiring the specialist hardware on which it has tended to run is now harder to justify, given competitive forces from outside the traditional Unix camp. Nevertheless, that’s not stopping Apple and Sun from following their instincts.
Unix emerged in the 1970s as a collaboratively developed standards-based operating system that would allow much easier portability of software applications across different computers than was the case with the mainframe and mini computers that prevailed at the time.
Of course, declaring support for industry standards is one thing – adhering to them is quite another. While many companies paid lip service to the idea of ‘Open Systems’, in practice each customised its own ‘flavour’ of Unix by building its own presentation layer on to one or other of the popular kernels and then bundling it with their own, usually proprietary hardware.
Various initiatives and standards aimed at bringing about some semblance of unity and/or compliance – Posix, OSF, X-Open, ACE – came and went in a stream of alphabet soup while all the time each computer maker carried on offering its own ‘differentiated’ product.
Two factors brought a modicum of rationalisation to the Unix market.
First, Microsoft and Intel grew up. Processors of the Pentium generation began to approach the performance capabilities of the RISC processors that powered Unix, and Intel’s manufacturing muscle produced economies of scale, which made the price performance of its processors unbeatable.
Microsoft’s Windows operating systems may cause many technical purists to sneer at their comparative unreliability and instability, their vulnerability to malicious code and their intrusive and expensive licensing policies, but nobody can gainsay the benefits of a de facto standard with which many users are familiar and which runs on the cheapest commodity hardware.
Which leads us on to the second factor undermining traditional Unix: the growth of Linux and open source software. A too-good-to-be-true combination of Unix reliability on commodity Intel hardware, with no licence fees or restrictions, has made waves among the technically erudite.
The upshot has been that many proprietary Unix systems are on the way out, with the companies that spawned them either disappearing through failure or merger (ICL, Siemens Nixdorf, Compaq, Digital). Meanwhile, many of those that remain like HP, IBM and Fujitsu Siemens have consolidated around a few key implementations like Solaris and AIX, and have adopted Linux and/or Windows as a key part of their strategies.
Sun has so far refused to countenance adopting Windows into its product offerings, although last year the company finally aped its major rivals by adopting Intel-compatible hardware in some of its products. It has also proclaimed support for Linux, particularly for desktop productivity applications where it complements rather that competes with Sun servers.
Sun’s Scott McNealy has saved some face by insisting that the company’s 64bit Intel-compatible machines will contain AMD’s Opteron processor rather than Intel’s Itanium because, as he put it in Berlin: ‘Dat dawg don’ hunt!’
Sceptics who questioned Sun’s long-term commitment to its Sparc technology, or who wondered how Sun’s traditional reliance on high-margin sales of hardware for the bulk of its profit would survive a migration to commodity processors, were met with familiar McNealy bluster. ‘Piston rings are not a major factor in the choice of a car and neither should technical minutiae like choice of microprocessor concern IT systems purchasers,’ barked McNealy at ComputerScope.
McNealy remains resolute, however, that systems rather than the services increasingly offered by large IT companies like IBM and HP should be the overriding factor influencing strategic IT purchases and the key distinguishing feature of Sun’s systems remains Solaris.
Apple, on the other hand, makes no bones about the fact that its Unix server strategy is first and foremost about defending its share of the desktop market in areas, such as publishing and the creative industries, where it maintains a strong niche.
According to Eric Zelenka, the man in charge of Apple’s server operating system strategy worldwide, the company found that its desktop presence was being eroded because of its lack of a creditable server strategy, hence its renewed focus on servers.
Having said which, the company is also keen to point out that the third most powerful computer cluster in the world at the Virginia Polytechnic is comprised of its computers, thereby showing that Apple’s servers can now reach parts that its computers never tried to reach before.
If there is room for proprietary Unix in a market increasingly dominated by de facto standards, the next question should be: how many ‘flavours’ can be accommodated? And if Apple’s Unix servers are more expensive than their Intel counterparts, they are still significantly cheaper than the bulk of Sun’s products.
If Apple can gain headway in the server market, Sun could yet find itself being hunted by a very unfamiliar hound.
23/02/04
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