Santa Cruz Operation Inc SVP marketing Ray Anderson’s frank about mistakes the company made since it acquired Unix from Novell Inc – including the corpse of the grand 3DA Unix alliance with Hewlett-Packard Co – but thinks SCO has put its cards face up on the table with the unveiling of UnixWare 7. Anderson, who wasn’t in the job when any of this came down, regrets SCO didn’t pay better attention to partners like NCR Corp, which he thinks was lost to Sun’s Solaris x86 because SCO wasn’t receptive enough to its needs. SCO seems to think it will get NCR back in the long run and is pleased enough with the marketing deal the HP venture left it with, which as we said at the time appeared doomed from the outset over key items such as big- and little-endian issues. Anderson’s arrival did however coincide with the abandoning of Gemini, SCO’s original plan to merge its UnixWare and OpenServer code bases, which the company realized was going to alienate the OpenServer community, by far and away the its most important revenue stream. SCO now faces a titanic battle with Sun, HP, DEC and others for the Unix-on-Merced Holy Grail.
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