> With the caveat that any new competition that enters the market would trigger a renewed round of privacy for any future improvements. Rather like establishing and publishing a checkpoint.
Who's going to enter a market that they know they'll be thrown out of ? The VCs wouldn't think of supporting such a company. And PSI has already burnt around ten times what UMX or Fundamental burnt. "Eating shoe leather" (not my expression) is what they _haven't_ been doing. At the end of a working day, 3/4s of Fundamental's staff go home in the same car. Look at PSI's run rate, even without the lawyers. Rebuilding Amdahl with the air conditioning but without the revenue. IBM has pretty much replaced its architecture in the first couple of years of each decade - System/370, XA, ESA, zArchitecture. Very roughly once per decade. Next one due after z6 - 2012?. Memory sharing with Intel IA64 processors? It took the old PCMs _years_ to get established. More recently look at how long it took Fundamental - and they were using IBM's hardware and IBM's VAR chain. Seven years? Does NOT happen overnight. Hell, even working COMPLETELY within IBM, it took nearly a year to get xSeries 430 EFS Ts&Cs agreed. 4.5 years now to run to zFuture? If z/Architecture were completely released now, PSI _might_ have a 30 month window. And that's assuming they can execute - I don't see that from their company structure, which I strongly suspect was built around the idea of doing an IPO/sale and leaving the sales/marketing to others. The loss of HP was a total disaster for PSI. HP is on every street corner in Europe - NEC has _nothing_ _like_ the dealer or support structure. It's pretty close to one office per country. PSI can't, like Fundamental did, use IBM's dealer chain - which adds to the complexity because it will need to use them to dispose of the hardware it displaces and also supply ancilliaries. Putting together a reseller chain in Europe would be several times as difficult as doing the same for Fundamental - not least because the number of target sites has halved, as had the number of potential partners. Plus the Intel processors will be unknowns for performance purposes. Things got a whole lot easier for Fundamental once I persuaded its partners to use xSeries platforms. The EU case changes a few things. I don't think there's a doctrine of unclean hands in EU law. The trade secrets business might just evaporate. I know several Amdahlers who said they were hacked off at having to sign TIDA/TILA because they'd reverse engineered most of it anyway. If PSI is right and you just have to know where to look (source for Hercules, source for z/Linux,etc.) then it's not an issue. There is no secrecy regarding patents - the whole point is to publish the discovery so you can claim it. Reading patents, of course, is dangerous and most lawyers recommend against it. Closing roads to keep them private? Yup - common in the UK. There's at least one road locally that levies a toll of 1p per person passing on Maundy Thursday. -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
