[ale] 16

[STEVEN_DUCHENE at HP-USA-om1.om.hp.com]

I wonder if some of the declines in sales of RISC system sales mentioned
in the attached article that is being attributed to increased sales of
NT/Intel systems is actually due to people running Linux/FreeBSD/NetBSD
on Intel systems?

					Steve

.......................................................................

RISC system sales top $50 billion in 1996 - report

---------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wednesday, January 8, 1997
Source: Reuters
---------------------------------------------------------------

CARMEL, California, Reuters via Individual Inc. : Revenues for computer
systems using reduced instruction set computing (RISC) microprocessors
and
the Unix operating system rose by $10 billion to $51.7 billion in 1996, a
market survey has found.

However, industry analyst Andrew Allison said in his annual survey of the
industry released on Monday that the rate of growth of RISC systems
revenues
slowed significantly to 24 percent compared with more than 40 percent a
year
earlier.

Most vendors grew roughly with the market and, Allison said in his
January
"Inside the New Computer Industry" report, they had essentially
maintained
their market position.

Hewlett-Packard Co's <HWP.N> share of the revenue pie for RISC systems
slipped fractionally to 29.6 percent from 30.0 percent in 1995, according
to
the report, while the Power and PowerPC systems used by International
Business Machines Corp <IBM.N> and others slipped to 27.5 percent from
28.3
percent.

Sun Microsystems Inc's <SUNW.O> SPARC systems gained a half a percentage
point to 17.0 percent of the RISC systems revenue, according to the
survey,
while MIPS systems produced and licensed by Silicon Graphics Inc <SGI.N>
slid to 15.9 percent from 16.3 percent.

Digital Equipment Corp's <DEC.N> Alpha systems rose nearly 50 percent,
but
this reflected its relatively small base of 8.9 percent in 1996 and 6.0
percent in 1995 and the contribution of its high-end servers, Allison
said.

Allison said 1997 would be another challenging year, as Microsoft Corp's
<MSFT.O> Windows NT and the Intel Corp <INTC.O> chips which together are
known as the "Wintel" platform continue to win customers away from RISC
systems.

The shift is particularly pronounced in the market for workstations --
high-end desktop computer devices -- as opposed to the powerful computer
servers, which relay traffic and tasks between whole groups of computer
users.

Allison estimated RISC/Unix workstation unit shipments to actually
declined
by between five and 10 percent last year, with revenue at best flat
during
the period.

Industry executives have blamed the sluggish market for traditional
workstations in part on the launch of a new upgrade of Microsoft's
Windows
NT. Allison said the RISC/Unix workstation volume decline will
"accelerate
markedly this year" unless vendors match Wintel price and performance.

"... the only obstacle between Wintel and domination of the new technical
workstation mid-range today, namely application availability, is rapidly
being whittled away," he said.

--sam.perry at reuters.com, Palo Alto Bureau +1 415 846 5400