Wings Over the Pyre - July 5th, 2001

06:47 am - Office Space

Ah, yes, the morning office.

All night in the Compaq Unix support building, it was silent. Dead. This is not wholly unusual for we Third Shifters, but the absolute depth of the night-silence was almost frightening tonight. To combat it, we hearty soul procured food (BBQ ribs) and drink (orange soda) to combat the demons. And combated they were, as the feeding and merriment went on long into the night.

Perhaps not merriment. The primary topic of discussion was the incredible idiocy of selling the Alpha chip technology to Intel. Intel, you know, the producers of the upcoming Itanium chip. Fools and ignorant wastrels. They take a 64bit architecture that's finally been beaten into near-usability after 10 years of development, and sell it to those who are their primary competition. Then the management ignoranti declare that by 2003 Tru64 Unix will be ported to the Itanium architecture and the Alpha is no more.

Oh, joy! Let us see exactly how swiftly we can cut our own throats, shall we? Cut out the current installed hardware base, they're in a dead-end architecture for which they will never have new upgrades. Cut out the current installed software base, who never had an extensive number of applications for their Tru64 environ, anyway. Cut out the support Engineers who have been trying to get the 5.x series to run stably on the hardware we have.

Consider: you have a company whose primary high-end server market is driven by the advantage its hardware+software solution has over the competition in Transactions/Minute/Dollar of the system. It has lousy tools and a quirky underlying command set, and doesn't even have the excuse of being Linux to explain it. Now ... take away its hardware advantage and make it compete with other 64bit OS systems who've sunk their R&D money into tools and interfaces for users/administrators.

Stripped of advantages, how do you expect to win in the marketplace?

Anyone looking for an experienced Unix OS techniciant/support/programer? Resumes on request.

Current Mood: angry