[Fedora-ia64-list] [rhelv5-list] Itanium support ...

[Zoran Popović]

2010/2/16 Tom Sightler <ttsig at tuxyturvy.com>

> ...
>
> Still, comparisons based solely on "revenue" does fairly represent
> market share from Redhat's perspective.  Even if revenue was somehow
> equal, $300 million would be what, probably a few thousand EPIC servers,
> but that same amount would equate to 10's of thousands of x86 servers
>

or 10's of thousands of blade systems (even bl870s which are high-end in
that range at the moment only for shortly, while smaller HP Integrity blades
cost not much more than Xeon-based Proliants - I don't know if people around
this are aware of that, and that new Itaniums will use same motherboard
chipsets as new Xeons) ...
... or a couple of unknown IBM mainframes, whatever.


> because they cost so much less per unit.  Redhat has to make enough
> profit of the sheer number of machines, not how much money those
> machines costs.  It's quite likely that Redhat would be willing to keep
> Itanium support around as long as customers were willing to pay 10x more
> than x86 customers for support, but my guess is they are not, so Redhat
> looks at it and says it's a market where they can't make money.  Markets
> that don't make money are not good markets.
>
>
sorry, I didn't know that leaders still follow mainly and only that old
fashioned rule to make as much as possible with the shortest time-to-value
... I also thought that we got past beyond tribal wars. Even if it's so, it
all gives me the chills, the fact I've learned so far that M$ boosted AMD
fire, that Oracle through glove into IBM's face with million dollar prize
about database machine, that HP is indifferent toward open source and that
Red Hat decided to abandon Xen as one of the moving spirits of the open
source - why ? Other mature virtualization platforms don't have open source
base, and business doesn't like often changes and bleeding edge ... I
remember the ramblings on fedora forums, but I still think it all happened
to fast ...


> You might wonder why they still support IBM Power and System/z which
> likely also have similar market share and that would be a valid
> question, but my guess would be that IBM provides some financial
> incentive to do so.
>
>
Incentives, incentives ... I have to use that word more often ... I know
that even Linus Torvalds mentioned price and real life put as the knife in
Itanium's (Intel's ?) back, but is it really all just about market shares
and price ? Did really all good things come from that ? Maybe it wouldn't be
10x more, but yes - customer would be willing to pay more for Red Hats
support, that is the point I was selling in my company, too (it really is a
good service, sincerely, and you probably wouldn't even dream what are they
all willing to pay for instead) - in time it could be corrected if that was
all the problem, the support subscription price. I am truly sad if it is so,
silly HP lost healthy competition, fat cats got fatter, some people lost
good business and open source lost possible incentives ... if I ever become
a manager ...


> Later,
> Tom
>
>
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