In the battle for the future of computing, the flash of the “Browser War” and “Java Joust” sideshows have obscured the real main event.
The audience may be watching Microsoft Corp. and the confrontations emerging from its quest to control the desktop computer–Internet Explorer vs. Netscape Navigator, Java vs. Win32 and ActiveX, NC vs. the PC.
But the more important competition is for dominance in servers, large computers that collect, manage and distribute data to users over a network. The market for these computers reached $24 billion in 1996.
Most people never see a server, but if they use a networked computer on the job–or surf the Web–they’re getting information that originates there. For years, the most powerful servers have been controlled by a sophisticated operating system known as Unix, available in variations from Sun Microsystems Inc., Silicon Graphics Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Tandem Computers Inc., IBM and Digital Equipment Corp.
But for four years, Microsoft has been inching its way into the server market from the low end, with an inexpensive, easy-to-use operating system called Windows NT. The battle began in earnest last week with the first of a series of announcements designed to bring NT into Unix’s league.
– At the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, Microsoft took the wraps off Hydra, a version of NT that can support multiple users at inexpensive terminals. And Microsoft’s hardware partners showcased the first of powerful fault-tolerant systems, designed to give users confidence that their NT-based servers won’t crash.
Promised before summer are sophisticated security features, enhanced communications and a method to link discrete, NT-operated computers into a unified system. But the grand finale will be the unveiling of NT 5.0, which will consolidate those enhancements into a single package, increase the power of NT systems with new ability to support multiple processors, and pave the way for Microsoft to start adding faster “64-bit” processing to the operating system over the next two years. While Microsoft originally hoped to release the new version next summer, it now looks like it may be the end of the year or even early 1999 before it’s out.
But once the power gap closes, NT’s inherent advantages over Unix become all the more tantalizing: It runs on standard Intel processors, making it much cheaper than the highly specialized Unix systems, and its desktop interface looks a lot like Windows 95, familiar ground for most users.
“We can already meet 95 percent of a business user’s needs with NT Server,” said Paul Stanton, marketing director for Microsoft’s Enterprise Customer Unit. “When we introduce NT 5.0, we’ll be able to handle everything.”
Most computer manufacturers agree that NT is coming on fast. Almost every one offers or plans to offer an NT-based product.
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But many believe Unix still has a major place in the industry–and no one argues that more fervently than Sun Microsystems of Palo Alto, Calif., the only major “pure” Unix company left.
Sun hopes to use its powerful Unix systems in conjunction with the Java programming language to chip away at Microsoft’s control of the desktop, even as Microsoft is trying to move from the desktop up to the server.
Everything that Microsoft plans to add to NT, “Unix already has,” said Brian Croll, director of Solaris server product marketing at SunSoft, Sun Microsystems’ software arm. “Sun’s been saying that the network is the computer for 14 years. NT will probably get there at some point, but it’s not like we’ll be standing still.”
In recent years, the market in Unix has boomed as companies have rushed to support thousands of employees on internal networks called intranets, or potentially millions of possible customers over the Internet. For those big tasks, only Unix offers enough power right now.
Companies like Sun, SGI and HP market Unix-based systems with as many as 64 processors–and promise to increase that number to more than 1,000 in the next three years. These systems can support thousands of users in a business, or let millions of consumers access a Web site. Communications and security features let these users exchange data without fear that it will be intercepted or corrupted. And businesses have confidence that the systems will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
“There’s what I call enterprise computing with a small `e’ and then enterprise computing with a big `E’,” said Jean Bozman, a senior industry analyst for International Data Corp. in Mountain View, Calif. “You can be located in every part of a business and crucial to how that company does business, but that doesn’t mean a company’s going to run its most mission-critical applications on it. Big companies aren’t ready to try and turn over their most important business applications to NT.”
So far, the sales of NT and Unix reflect that point of view. NT is already well-established in the market, and was the fastest growing network operating system in 1996 with 732,000 units sold. But most of those NT systems are being used primarily to store files and manage printing tasks, the lowest rung on the server ladder.
And even some of Microsoft’s NT partners are skeptical that NT is ready to reach for the top.
“Our customers are very interested in NT,” said Jocelyne Attal, vice president of NT marketing at IBM, “but we see it being used mostly as a file and print server, and a little more frequently now as an application server. It’s going to be at least five years before NT can provide the kind of services it needs to actually run a business on.”
Microsoft doesn’t believe it has five years to wait, and the company may be right. The server battle has moved into Internet time.
For the past 17 years, the desktop has defined computing. Companies have actually spent more money over that time period on larger computers, running Unix or proprietary operating systems, but the focal point of their buying decisions was what employees had on the desktop. Overwhelmingly that has been Microsoft’s operating systems, first DOS, and then Windows.
But the recent Internet craze may change the way people choose their computers. Folks who never saw a need for a PC before are eager to start surfing the Web, and they don’t much care how they do it.
Unlike the PC, the Internet is defined by the server, which stores all the data and programs a user experiences–excepting the Web browser itself. If Microsoft can’t wrest control of the server market from Unix, and the Internet’s popularity continues, the desktop might begin to slip away.