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From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Subject: Re: SCO market share
Message-ID: <CHpyE0.Arn@telly.on.ca>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 1993 13:49:08 GMT
References: <1993Dec03.172422.1339@sco.com> <1993Dec7.160306.14988@rwwa.COM> <1993Dec07.164143.7863@sco.com>
Organization: Somewhere just far enough out of Toronto
Lines: 46
In article <1993Dec07.164143.7863@sco.com>
staceyc@socoban.sco.com (Stacey Campbell) writes:
>In article <1993Dec7.160306.14988@rwwa.COM> witr@rwwa.com writes:
>>| Since SCO Unix is installed on about 60 per cent of all Unix-for-Intel
>>| platforms...
>>I'd like to see the proof for this claim. I think it is bogus, unless
>>you restrict the term ``Unix-for-intel'' so that it only applies to SCO
>>and SCO-look-alikes (whatever that may mean).
>I of course can't prove anything and may be a victim of my own
>company's propaganda, but here's something SCO tacks on to the end
>of press releases. [...]
> According to International Data Corporation,
> SCO accounts for 65 percent of the market for UNIX Systems on
> Intel platforms, as well as approximately one fourth of all UNIX
> Systems installed worldwide.
This sounds right, but remember, it includes Xenix. If you were to
specify the market share of SCO Unix or ODT alone, the numbers would be
considerably smaller.
There are a *lot* of sites out there still running Xenix. For a non-GUI,
non-networked environment, it's a stable environment that's less of a
resource hog than most current Unixoid systems. There's a very good reason
why SCO won't drop Xenix from its product line years after it "upgraded"
to Unix. Xenix still sells.
What's most interesting to me about the 65% number, is not that it's so
high, but that it appears to be falling. I seem to recall it wasn't that
long ago that SCO had about 80% of the market. While that number is nice,
recall that for most of Xenix's early life there was *no* effective
competition. Interactive? Yeah, right.
What I'm more interested in knowing than installed base, is what's
selling *now*. What proportion of the Unix-on-Intel systems shipped in
1993 were SCO, or UnixWare, or Solaris, etc? It doesn't look like *any*
of the vendors are interested in giving out these numbers. If IDC had
any guts, *that's* the stat they should be researching.
--
Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!utzoo!telly!evan / (905) 452-0504
I can't complain, but sometimes I still do -- Joe Walsh