Popularity of various flavors of UNIX

[B.BURGER]

[Bzzzz]

Bill Tuthill uses figures about the installed base of UNIX systems
to analyze what versions of UNIX* (System V, XENIX, etc.) will
be popular in the future.  A few reminders on getting from here to there:

  1) Don't confuse UNIX *systems* (which most data describe) with
     *users*.  As an analogy, there are a lot of MS-DOS systems,
     but only about 1 user per system.

  2) The installed base of an OS depends on (primarily):
     - how good it is
     - how good the hardware on which it runs is
     - how long it's been sold, and how well
     - how much good software runs under it (there bidrectional
       causality here)
     
     Since System V hasn't been on the market long, one wouldn't expect it
     to have a big share yet.

  3) The future popularity of an OS -- which commercial software developers
     have to predict -- depends on similar factors, but looking toward
     the future instead of the past.  Thus you should consider
     which versions of UNIX will be supported best.


--Bruce Burger     AT&T-Information Systems     Freehold, NJ
  {...ihnp4!}hogpc!btb

* UNIX is a trademark of AT&T Bell Laboratories