[geeks] Opinions on "A personal view of Sun Microsystems"?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Sridhar Ayengar wrote:

>> On Tue, 11 Apr 2006, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>>
>>>     2003 (two "major" jumps), IBM released AIX 4.3.3 through 5.3 (two
>>
>> s/two$/one/
>
> I'd call the 4.3.3 -> 5.1 jump major, and I'd call the 5.1 -> 5.2 jump
> major.  In fact, I think going from 5.1 -> 5.2 is a bigger jump than
> going from 4.3.3 -> 5.1.

Absolutely, but they pulled it off without calling it AIX 6 or breaking
any compatibility.  Strictly from an executive point-of-view, AIX
5.1->5.2 was a point release, whereas Solaris 7->8 was a "major
upgrade", even though there was very little code change between SunOS
5.7 and SunOS 5.8.  Hence, why I put "major" in quotes.

Sun's re-versioning plan to leap ahead of all the other vendors to see
more "up-to-date" came back and bit them because of the perception that
running Solaris meant never being able to keep up.  I watched several
companies dump Solaris because I couldn't convince them that it was
-really- Solaris 2.7 -> 2.8.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke   )  "Humans that lose the capacity to think become
Elgin, TX          (    creatures whose existence has no value."
USA                 )                      --Schwarzwald, _The_Big_O_