Las Vegas - Focus, focus, focus. That was the advice for five of the top operating systems vendors at NetWorld + Interop 99.
Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) and Sun participated in a presidential-style debate hosted by Network World.
Novell surprised attendees by saying it is turning its focus to appliance servers.
"We are going to become a more special-purpose platform," said Drew Major, chief scientist at Novell. He downplayed the importance of having applications run on NetWare, saying that if the company's current emphasis on server-side Java doesn't pan out, there is no Plan B.
A very feisty Tamar Newberger, director of server product marketing for SCO, let the fists fly when she staked out SCO's ground as the most widely used version of Unix running on Intel. Newberger said SCO already has a hold on small to midsize businesses, and the company is now diving into the enterprise and data center market.
She labeled her competitors as "NetWare, beware, shelfware and nowhere," respective to Novell, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun.
Solaris product executive Brian Croll spent his time defending his company's investment in Solaris on the RISC-based SPARC platform. He called it the best option for supporting high-end database and Web applications and said that title warrants the steep price his product sports.
While Sun touted its ability to scale, Red Hat ducked questions about Linux's ability to support thousands of users.
Erik Troan, director of engineering at Red Hat, conceded that the performance of the Linux 2.0 kernel was not up to par. But Troan said the company was tabulating benchmark results on the Linux 2.2 kernel and that Microsoft was in for a shock.
Meanwhile Microsoft took its fair share of hits from all the vendors over the mammoth size and its numerous delays with Windows 2000. Jim Ewel, director of marketing for Windows 2000, dodged rumors of unreliability, unmanageability and backward incompatibility. He also said that Microsoft would not be licensing Windows 2000 code to any of his competitors.
Answering a question from Croll about whether Windows 2000 will go down in the annals as a successor to OS/360, Copland and Solaris 2.0 as "the software project from hell," Ewel said a mere "yes."
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