I took the liberty to adjust the subject to the topic
Jurgen Haan wrote:
> Serge Rielau wrote:
>
>
>> The question for commercial vendors is: Does the market share as
>> defined in revenue shrink or grow. So far it has been growing. And
>> that is what is counting for teh commercial vendors.
>> As long as the pie for commercial vendors grows there is no threat.
>>
>
> By marketshare, is this the share divided over commercial products?
Correct. That's how it's commonly counted.
> Because OS products cannot be calculated in this pie. no one can measure
> the number of OS products in use, number of downloads is no good,
> because the OS databases are mirrored and distributed among different
> Linux/Unix flavors. To illustrate, no one on the face of this earth
> (except the ones who work here) could know we use postgreSQL and Mysql
> in our company, since the medium where it's installed from is a copied
> slackware distro, and the databases are installed on several servers.
> But for registered figures, we only use DB2, because we are a registered
> customer with db2.
Right. To gartner you are true blue and as long as your IBM rep doesn't
feel mySQL is eating into space that should better be owned by DB2 IBM
doesn't care.
> If you mean that the total amount of customers is growing, then you're
> right, that's a good thing.
Absolutely, and as long as the total amount of customesr grows for both
commercial and OS then that's good enough.
> Considering tech aspect, most OS products tend to surpass their
> commercial counterparts quite fast.
<snip>
I think we largely agree. Not sure I agree on the technological surpassing.
I do not see Linux desktops (yet) outside of the geeky area and I don't
see how Linux has knocked teh commercial OS vendors over technologically.
Note however how Microsoft is struggling to incite customers to upgrade.
There is little to be gained technologically by going from one version
of Windows to the next for the vast majority of desktop users.
To most Windows 2000 was good enough. The moment Linux desktops
environment catch up with W2k and that is widely known I'd expect MS
#installations to tank unless they go free themselves because MS has no
where to go with the desktop.
If you look at DBMS again vendors are trying to avoid the trap by moving
upstream into "Information Integration" and "Content management" (see
IBM's shopping spree) and Apps (Peoplesoft, Retek). Not moving upstream
to provide value means getting clobbered by the mySQL et al.
Cheers
Serge
--
Serge Rielau
DB2 SQL Compiler Development
IBM Toronto Lab
Received on Thu Aug 04 2005 - 07:33:27 CDT
