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Others are probably better positions to comment on and better informed about
these events, on the direction this part of the industry and HP in
particular are taking, are likely to take, and what may come of all this. It
will certainly be interesting to read those comments, and to watch what
happens... My own $.02 is that HP's investment in Linux can be a win-win,
and make Linux and therefore HP-UX a far more important player than Andrew
Allison thinks, below. This is in contrast to Project Monterey, a single
source-tree 64-bit UNIX initiative, that does not look like it will be open
source, and will in some sense be a 'proprietary' offering from IBM, Intel,
SCO, Sequent, Acer, Bull, Fujitsu, and Unisys (and perhaps others). If HP
chooses to market itself as a one-stop solution(s) provider, along the lines
of Denys's recommendation, and the market starts to care more about what a
platform DOES than about what the platform IS, this could be a good thing
for our favorite POSIX .2 compliant OLTP engine. At least, that's my hope...


I think that this article speaks for itself, and recommend reading it and
checking related links; CNET News.com - IBM buys Sequent for $810 million
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,0-38992,00.html?st.ne.lh..ni - The deal
shores up IBM's position in Project Monterey, a next-generation version of
Unix in which IBM and Sequent are partners... 

The following quotes are from Andrew Allison's The Future of Unix article in
his Inside the New Computer Industry® newsletter
http://www.ibm.com/servers/monterey/news/may99ed.pdf. I recommend skimming
the whole article. He seems to think that HP has the losing hand in this.
Again, others can critique his ideas better than I can. I obviously think
that he is missing the importance of HP's role in Linux's future. 
Longer term, it now appears as though the Monterey distributions and Linux
will fight it out for leadership of the Unix-on-IA market. 
In reality, Project Monterey is nothing less than an across-the-board,
frontal assault on NT, the 64-bit OS
component of which is Monterey/64. 
Of the other two major Unix-based system vendors, HP appears to me to be the
biggest loser despite having signed up for the UDG initiative... and ISVs
anyway) HP, which is losing Unix system market share, is clearly vulnerable
and Monterey kicks out one of the three legs of the company's strategy for
differentiation in the IA-64 space, namely HP-UX (the other two, compilers
and system logic, are also looking a bit shaky). Why
would HP-UX users move to a proprietary implementation on IA-64 when there's
an open standard
supported by multiple platform vendors available? Because it's the best
implementation around? Hardly. Has the best transition story? No longer. 

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