Andrew Allison has been counting again, and in his annual audit of the Unix on RISC market, the Carmel, California industry analyst finds that sales of computers using reduced instruction set microprocessors and the Unix operating system rose by only $10bn to $51.7bn in 1996. Only is used because the growth in 1995 was 40% and the 1996 figure represents a slowing to 24%. Most vendors grew roughly with the market, Allison reckons, and his January Inside the New Computer Industry report reckons that they essentially maintained their market position – so much for IBM Corp’s solemn commitment to be top of the Unix tree by three or four years ago. Hewlett-Packard Co’s share of business slipped fractionally to 29.6% from 30.0% in 1995, and the Power and PowerPC systems of IBM Corp and its allies Motorola Inc and Compagnie des Machines Bull SA slid to 27.5% from 28.3%. Sun Microsystems Inc and allies gained half a percentage point to 17.0% with their Sparc machines, while machines using MIPS Computer Systems Inc’s R-series from Silicon Graphics Inc and a host of other vendors fell to 15.9% from 16.3%. Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha systems may have risen nearly 50%, but this still took them to only 8.9% in 1996 from 6.0% in 1995. The slow-down is attributed to Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT on iAPX-86 processors, which other researchers say now accounts for 2 million installations. This is expected to get worse this year – unless the NT graphics workstations and high-end Windows NT server installations start falling over in droves as many hesitant customers fear they will. Allison estimates that Unix on RISC workstation unit shipments actually declined by between 5% and 10% last year, with revenues flat at best.
Content from our partners
