IBM unleashes the RS/6000 on the general business market in Europe – but in the US, noIBM appeared to downplay the potential of the new RS/6000 machines in the business market at its US launches, but in the UK, business opportunities were given equal footing with scientific and technical applications – IBM no doubt remembered the reception for the ill-favoured RT (which, incidentally will cease to be available from IBM from May 15): it was initially touted in the UK as a technical workstation to the sound of widespread indifference. Only when the clamour of business software developers and users became too loud to ignore did IBM change its tune and admit that, yes, it could be used as a business machine. After that, the RT, or 6150, enjoyed more success in the UK than anywhere else. This time round, IBM did not dare to underplay the machine to the commercial marketplace. We haven’t seen the way the machine was presented in other parts of Europe, but almost certainly the pitch was the same as in the UK – apart from the fact that the RT was successfully marketed almost exclusively for business in Europe, IBM does not have the same enormous base of System 36 users in Europe to protect for the AS/400. And from a business standpoint, the AIX 3 operating system has one or two key attractions for business over other implementations of Unix, most notably a file system that doesn’t leave the user spending three days picking up the pieces all over the floor if the cleaner decides that the power point into which the machine is plugged is needed for the Hoover.
RS/6000 Notes
The RS/6000 POWERserver 540 uses the recently announced 4M-bit memory chips from IBM’s Essex Junction, Vermont base, and all the RS/6000 models will use 4Ms in the future. R i o sThe new AIX 3.0 operating system integrates portions of Unix System V.3, Berkeley 4.3 and some Mach characteristics: initially, it is being only offered on the RS/6000 machines.
R I O S
The initial database offerings for the new machine come from Sybase Inc, Informix Software Inc, Oracle Corp and Ingres Inc; access to DB2 on IBM mainframes will be offered inasmuch as IBM can do it – of course, with SAA, there is an intent implied for an SQL relational database: is Unix now a part of SAA, or is it sitting beside it as the queen of the Blue Kingdom to SAA’s king? IBM is sort of saying that the latter is the way things are going to be. R I O S
At the New York press event, only Sun and DEC machines were compared with the new systems – the presenters drew back a wall to reveal similarly configured Sparc- and DECstations running the same application as the RS/6000 already on view – and then drew the wall back again when the RS had finished and the other two were still grinding away, saying you don’t want to see any more of those; where was Hewlett? George Conrades went tight lipped: HP is very well respected – we only used the highest performing machines in our benchmarks.
R I O S
Ramp up for the new machines should take 90 to 120 days: IBM added that DEC and Sun Microsystems were shipping only around 6,000 units each in the first year they offered their RISC machines, and that it expects to do better than that; the aim is for IBM to be a, if not the, market leader by 1992 or 1993.
R I O S
Among the comments from Advanced Workstations chief Nicholas Donofrio were a promise that IBM would make AIX 3 source available, and that the company would be supporting diskless models of the RS/6000 – and he added We’ve built the world’s most powerful desktop computer – there are three versions of our processor: fast, faster, and goes like hell.
The fur flies between Visix and IXI over IBM’s endorsement of X.desktop
Not to be outdone by its rival IXI Ltd’s scoop on winning the desktop manager contract for IBM’s RS/6000 systems, Visix Software has rushed out an announcement that it has signed a strategic marketing agreement – although it is not a bundling arrangement – with Solbourne Computer Inc, Longmont, Colorado. Visix, of Arlington, Virginia, markets the Looking Glass desktop man
ager and Directory Shell, generally pitched as a more expensive product than IXI’s X.desktop product. The two companies are locked in battle to win the remaining contracts for hardware manufacturers looking to bundle in an X Window-based graphical user interface with their systems. But according to Visix vice-president of sales George Hoyem, Cambridge, UK-based IXI is not playing fair. They are giving away the software in an effort to drive us out of the market, said Hoyem, who claimed that IXI had given away its source code for between $50,000 to 100,000 to some large companies, with no follow-on royalty streams – which according to Hoyem is like committing suicide. IXI’s Ray Anderson denied that X.desktop software had been sold on that basis – he claimed that the company has been consistently profitable for the last two years, and does not have major development costs to pay off. IXI claims NCR amongst its customers as well as IBM, and has another large contract in the pipeline; it is also continuing to talk to Solbourne. Hoyem said the IBM decision was a big disappointment, but a public relations problem rather than a deal problem. He claimed that, having spent up to $50m obtaining NeXTStep from Steve Jobs, IBM simply ran out of budget for the desktop manager component. IBM has been begging us to port to the RS/6000 – I’m confident we’ll make more money out of IBM than IXI, he said. Meanwhile, Visix is confident that it will remain a major player, despite the competition. Hoyem claimed that Data General recently closed a $20m deal with Texaco on the strength of Looking Glass, and that General Electric has chosen the product as its standard user interface, with a deal from Ford currently under negotiation. The company would not comment on rumours that Motorola Computer Systems, tipped to reorganise its computer operations to concentrate heavily on workstations, file servers and X terminals in March would also be taking Looking Glass.
