Which flavors of Unix will survive in a post-IA-64 world? The speakers at the ‘Charting the future’ event in London yesterday – hosted by Hewlett-Packard Co, Intel Corp, Microsoft Corp and Gartner Group – were agreed that there would only be three versions with significant market share. Among these would be Sun Microsystem’s Solaris and HP’s UX. However, although Gartner’s Ed Thompson was sure that there would be three major players left in the Unix field, he was not sure who the third would be. One thing is certain, and that’s that minor versions of Unix are history. The reason for this is that the cost of migrating Unix to IA-64 is likely to be around $125m a year. The panel expressed doubts that companies such as Silicon Graphics Inc and SCO could take these kind of costs.
