Consortium Seeks to Develop Faster Desktop Computer
A group of 21 computer companies led by Compaq Computer, Microsoft and Digital Equipment on Tuesday launched an ambitious effort to create a class of flexible and powerful desktop computers. But the widely anticipated announcement drew mixed reviews from analysts and industry officials.
The group hopes to create a successor to the 10-year-old International Business Machines-compatible standard that has dominated the PC industry, while meeting the challenge posed by engineering workstations made by Sun Microsystems, IBM and others. Business users would benefit from faster machines that feature powerful new networking and graphics capabilities.
The Advanced Computing Environment (ACE), as the initiative was named, laid out a broad set of standards for machines equipped with a new type of computer-on-a-chip from Mips Computer Systems and new software systems from Microsoft and the Santa Cruz Operation. The group also calls for the new system software to run on computers--such as the high-end PCs of today--that use chips from Intel Corp. as their brain.
Despite general agreement that an important market exists for the systems envisioned by ACE, analysts and industry executives reacted cautiously Tuesday, pointing out that consortiums were difficult to manage and that real products were well over a year away.
“I’m underwhelmed,” said George Colony, president of Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “It’s being pulled in too many different directions. I don’t see any unifying theme, except perhaps a desire to wound Sun.” Many consider the ACE consortium a means of countering Sun Microsystems’ success in selling powerful engineering workstations to people who traditionally bought PCs.
Scott Cook, president of Intuit Software, said he had not followed ACE closely but noted that “there has never been a technology product fostered by a coalition that has been successful. It’s usually the lone wolf, who doesn’t have to compromise, that makes it.”
Compaq Chief Executive Rod Canion compared ACE to the hugely successful IBM-compatible standard and said it would “open a floodgate of technical innovation” by allowing hardware and software companies to build upon a common set of standards.
But ACE actually proposes two hardware designs and two versions of basic software, called operating systems, that control the basic operations of the machines.
Developers of applications programs such as spreadsheets or word processors will therefore have to create different versions for the different operating systems.
Moreover, the operating system developed by Santa Cruz Operation will be a version of Unix, which is widely used in the technical world but has not been popular among commercial users. While the traditional problem with Unix--that it’s hard to use--is slowly being solved, the proliferation of different versions has slowed acceptance and prevented the development of a large base of applications software.
While the ACE/Santa Cruz Operation Unix is supposed to unify several existing versions, some saw it as just another confusing addition to a crowded alphabet soup.
“A lot of people would like to see a lifesaver tossed from the Unix ship,” said Spencer Leyton, senior vice president for business development at software developer Borland International. “This one is either foam or lead, and it hasn’t landed yet.”
Microsoft’s new operating system, OS/2 3.0, is its answer to the gradual encroachment of Unix onto the PC turf dominated by Microsoft’s far less powerful DOS operating system. The new system would be able to run all software written for DOS or the popular Windows enhancement and would feature much better networking capabilities and the ability to perform several tasks at once.
By developing a version for the Mips chip, which is based on a speedy new design concept known as reduced instruction set computing (RISC), Microsoft is ending its exclusive allegiance to Intel’s chips and giving a potentially strong long-term boost to the Mips design. Sun, IBM and Hewlett-Packard all have powerful RISC-based systems that run versions of Unix and are considered by Microsoft and Compaq to be long-term competitive threats.
The new ACE-compatible hardware and software is supposed to be ready for shipment to software developers by the end of the year, with commercial products emerging sometime next year. Colony and other analysts, however, were skeptical that the Microsoft operating system would be ready that soon.
