Doug Michels, executive vice-president of the Santa Cruz Operation Inc, told conference attendees that while Microsoft Corp’s NT had provided a welcome focus on 32-bit operating systems, it’s committment to open systems remains very weak. People now realise that MS-DOS is not a good enough basis for future systems, he said. But at NT developer’s conferences we’re told that Posix is only for winning Government bids, and we shouldn’t use it. He said that Microsoft would like to have the dominant position in the industry that IBM Corp had a few years ago but I don’t think that will happen. NT would not appear on any of the bigger selling RISC processors – Sparc, RS/6000 or Precision Architecture – for at least a year, probably two, said Michels, due to the difficulties of converting it for big-endian architectures. On alternatives to the Intel standard, Michels said the Advanced Computing Environment consortium failed because MIPS was a year late with the R4000 while Intel got the message and pulled forward its own chip development plans by a year. A two-year gap closed up. At some point in the future there many be another move, but there must be something like a five times price-performance advantage before people will move to another standard microprocessor environment. He justified Santa Cruz’s recent 50% price hike by claiming that open systems products have been undervalued. We price our products to be successful. Afterwards, Michels told our sister paper Unigram.X that Santa Cruz had still to commit itself to either Unix V.4 or Open Software Foundation Unix for its future releases. The Foundation technology is up in the air at the moment. But in an effort to beat the Foundation, Unix System Laboratories Inc set System V.4 off on a three source tree path – multiprocessing, graphics and security. We can’t use it, we have those things in one product. When it comes together as ES/MP it might be an option. System V.4.2 runs Santa Cruz applications because of Santa Cruz’s help he claimed. Santa Cruz has now completed four quarters profitably and plans as if we were public, said Michels. He said that it would go public when the time is right.
