Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!encore!bzs
From: bzs@Encore.COM (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: X Terminals & "our" Real World
Message-ID: <5008@xenna.Encore.COM>
Date: 1 Mar 89 06:03:02 GMT
References: <3440@stiatl.UUCP>
Organization: Encore Computer Corp, Marlboro, MA
Lines: 26
In-reply-to: meo@stiatl.UUCP's message of 28 Feb 89 18:16:48 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.15 of Tue Jun  9 1987 on xenna (berkeley-unix)


>Regardless of the veracity of the above statement, our fate as
>software developers is tied to PERCEIVED value of X11-supporting
>hardware. Most of the market is dominated by IBM PCs and derivatives
>thereof.

Although I realize you deserve a better answer about all I can say is
you're talking about the past and present and we're talking about the
(near) future. Most of the disagreements in the rest of your note are
pretty well summed up by this difference in perspective. The big wins
go to those who can read the next move although I'll admit adequate
livings can be carved out of focusing on the current and recent past
trends.

Put more to the point, the folks who founded Microsoft (eg) didn't
look at the PC in 1983 and say, gee, who owns these? Everyone's using
mainframes and minis, where's the market? The world pays on risk (it
also can be pretty rude to those who take the wrong risks.)

To try to analyze the X terminal market at this point is ludicrous,
the products have been available for *weeks* in most cases and the
major vendors are just making the software widely available (remember,
most people running X up until recently got it from MIT as an
experimental package.)

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||