IBM Corp is dumping Solaris as a general purpose operating system for its RS/6000 line apparently after the several large customers which originally expressed an interest in the combination and stimulated the development effort got cold feet and few if any other takers could be found. IBM shelved plans to host OS/2 on the boxes back in February. OS/2-for-PowerPC was to have been the cornerstone of a multiple operating system strategy IBM delineated a couple of years ago. It’s now retrenched to AIX, with NT – and maybe MacOS – on the side. Trying hard to put a brave face on its all-but-wasted development dollars, SunSoft says its PowerPC efforts will be re-focused at embedded markets. It will detail a plan at the Embedded Systems conference in September. SunSoft’s claims it’s been telling customers for some months that all previous aspirations for the general purpose Solaris-on-PowerPC are null and void. It blames IBM and its OS/2-on-PowerPC disaster for pushing the Solaris release so far back it fell off the shelf. It says Solaris could have been ready quite early but didn’t think it could lead the PowerPC operating system charge to establish a volume market; that was what OS/2 and MacOS were supposed to do. Once IBM pulled the plug on OS/2 that lack of confidence doomed Solaris’ broader efforts, it says.
