Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!husc6!cmcl2!beta!dzzr
From: dzzr@beta.UUCP (Douglas J Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Troubles
Summary: Symbolics and competition.
Message-ID: <15623@beta.UUCP>
Date: 17 Feb 88 04:40:09 GMT
References: <5233@well.UUCP>
Distribution: comp.ai,comp.lang.lisp
Organization: Los Alamos Natl Lab, Los Alamos, N.M.
Lines: 60

In article <5233@well.UUCP>, jjacobs@well.UUCP (Jeffrey Jacobs) writes:
> 
> From Computerworld:
> 
> "Seeking to stem the tide of continuing financial losses, troubled Symbolics
> announced the resignation of its two top officers last week."
> 
> Brian Sear resigned as president, COO and member of the board.  Russell
> Noftsiker resigned as CEO, but will continue as chairman.  Symbolics
> dismissed their chief financial officer last month.
> 
> Symbolics lost $15.4 Million on $23.8M in revenues in the second
> quarter.  Includes $11.2M for restructuring costs.
> 

Sad to say, but the resignations at Symbolics are no great surprise.
While Symoblics still provides a premier software development
environment (go ahead, flame me: I'll just ignore it), look at how far
they've fallen behind in the hardware arena:

	1) A Sun 3/260 w/16 MB will compare favorably to Symbolics'
top-of-the-line 3670 in terms of run-time for large CL applications. A
diskless 3/260 goes for about $35,800 (retail), whereas Symbolics is
still in the one-full-up-machine-per-user mode, at about $75,000 per
whack for a 3650 w/16 MB (slightly slower than the 3670).

	2) The Sun 4/whatever: promises to be about about 3 - 4 times
faster than the 3/260. (A guess - I haven't done any benches, but stuff
presented in comp.arch would indicate the expected speed-up).

	3) A Sun 68030 - based machine, purported to be ?x faster than a
3/260.

	4) After 3) above, I wouldn't be surprised to see Sun bump the
clock on the Sun 4/whatever from 10 MHz to 20 or more.

By comparison, what new hardware does Symbolics have in the pipe? The
only official thing we've heard about here is the Ivory VLSI chip
machine. It will supposedly deliver a 3x runtime improvement over the
3670.

As if the growing hardware performance/$ gap were not sufficient reason
for unease at Symbolics, Sun is also making some right moves WRT their
LISP development environment. SPE, (Symbolic Programming Environment)
promises to bring much of the LISP machine - like development and
debugging functionality to the Sun's LISP environment. (The current Sun
LISP development environment could kindly be described as "sparse").

As a consumer of LISP hardware & software, I would hate to see Symbolics
drop out of the running: competition is beneficial. On the other hand,
it's a tough world out there...


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These opinions are my very own. In fact, I seriously doubt that
anyone else would claim them.

Doug Roberts
Los Alamos National Laboratory
dzzr@lanl.gov