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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1760
Fear, Uncertainty, Dread: Dell Declares Unix "Dead"
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
March 2nd 2003
The battle is really over Linux v. Sun, not *nix.
In a spat at LinuxWorld last month, Sun and Dell bared their collective teeth, as Dell
Chief Information Officer (CIO) Randy Mott opened his keynote with the declaration
"Unix is Dead".
The irony of the remark was not lost on Sun Microsystems' Jonathan Schwartz, who noted
that Dell ran its supply chain on Sun-based systems. In a tit-for-tat reply, Mott said
that Dell was in the process of migrating away from Sun machines.
Mott's point was, however, serious. He argued that innovation was needed when
investing firms' IT recources; "maintenance of the status quo", he said, led to
obsolescence. 85% of a company's resources should be devoted to development and
innovation, Mott said. He also stated Dell was on track to achieve this goal, with a
25:75 status quo:innovation split.
Oddly enough, Dell is moving to Red Hat Linux and Oracle, hosted on its own servers.
Odd because, last time we looked, Linux was a *nix. Mott's key point, however, is that
while Linux is open-source, Unix isn't.
Analysis: To us, this just sounds like Dell doesn't want to pay for Sun systems
anymore, and prefers to leech off the virtually-free open-source Linux community,
incorporating improvements as they emerge. Giving impoverished Michael Dell a hand is
probably not what Torvalds had in mind.
You might argue that Apple has been selective about what it wants to open-source with
Darwin, and that's true. But at least Apple produces a lot of software itself, and the
hardware that goes with it. Dell? What does Dell innovate? The JIT supply line that
Toyota essentially invented in the 1950s? Like Toyota, Dell is essentially an
assembler, not a manufacturer, relying on a host of cottage industries for its
componentry. Unlike Toyota, Dell has no concept of quality and mostly sells
consumables, rather than durables. If all PC companies were like Dell - and some are -
'innovation' would be stuck in four feet of quicksand.
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