Who will survive commodity operating systems?

Back in March of 2000, I wrote that I expected IBM to purchase the Santa Cruz Operation. It looks like I was wrong. Caldera has announced that they will be purchasing the bits of SCOC that don't involve Tarentella. (UPDATE: IBM has killed Project Monterey and will integrate Linux with AIX 5L, due in the first quarter of 2001.)

SCOC had been the most likely of the *N?X players to take a dive because of Linux, since they compete directly on x86 hardware. It remains to be seen whether Caldera can make SCO's UNIX products worthwhile. While CALD won't own the intellectual property of SCO OpenServer, I find it hard to believe that anything other than liberation of the source will allow the OpenServer code to survive.

The next most likely *N?X player to fall was BSDI, but they remedied that by merging with Walnut Grove and supporting FreeBSD. SGI has a weak company, so they'll probably be the next, though they have been making significant internal changes to deal with the threat, including the release of products typically layered on IRIX. If SGI survives, it will be by merging the feature set of IRIX with GNU/Linux, becoming a boutique hardware vendor.

Update, 11-SEP-2003, WindRiver, which had purchased the merged BSDI/Walnut Grove, just discontinued BSD/OS.

Operating systems are becoming a commodity item. This is leading to consolidation, driven primarily by GNU/Linux and open source software. The next few years will see the UNIX server and workstation manufacturers crumble unless they can successfully integrate open source into their business model. The remaining players will be IBM, HP, and Compaq/DEC, because they are diversified companies, and Sun, because of their installed base. Microsoft's sales will be affected, but their prospects remain healthy because of their dominance of the desktop market. Overall server market expansion will tend towards UNIX-like operating systems, dominated by open source software such as Linux and FreeBSD. Overall workstation market expansion will tend towards Intel architecture systems, because of costs, dominated by open source software and Microsoft.

The primary threat to IBM, HPQ, and SUNW from open source software would be if something along the lines of the clustering and high availability solutions were available.

current stock prices