Unix players voice support for Net.

The leaders of the Unix industry came face to face at Unix Expo Plus held in New York last week.

Janice McGinn was there.

If there was one strong message from this year's Unix Expo Plus, it is that nothing is clear cut. The annual Unix jamboree focused less on Unix and more on NT, the Internet, Java and networking.

Industry leaders are having no truck with purists. They are concerned with the enterprise in its broadest sense, rather than any old operating system. 'Unix is a choice,' said SCO's president, Alok Mohan.

Across the board - IBM, Digital, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Sun Microsystems and SCO - the trend is to embrace cross-platform technologies.

Keynote addresses from Ed Zander, president and chief executive of Sun Microsystems, SCO's Mohan and even the Microsoft interloper, Bill Gates, stressed the need for collaboration and intranet-oriented computing.

Bill Gates, striking a rare note of public humour, said: 'I hope I'm not out of place here.' He reminded the audience that Microsoft sold AT&T's Unix (Xinix) in the 1980s, and it had been the best-selling Unix flavour on the market.

'But AT&T was difficult to work with. It didn't understand the asset and it didn't act to prevent industry fragmentation,' he commented. So Microsoft used its Unix and Windows experience to create a new operating system.

Gates claimed: 'Windows NT is a form of Unix.' It is a highly technical system more suited to the skills of a Unix than a PC programmer, and Gates says this is no accident. 'We knew interoperability would be important and the programmers came from Unix. NT is both complementary and competitive to Unix,' he said.

To most versions of Unix, at least. There's always an exception and in this case, it was Sun. Unix Expo kicked off with a noisy keynote speech from Zander whose message reflected the tone of the conference - 'Power to the Internet' came across loud and clear.

Images of pipe-smoking father figures, puffing on Microsoft leaf tobacco, provided a video backdrop to Zander's wise-cracking comments about Bill Gates and Microsoft.

The bad feelings are mutual, and Gates appeared to have little affection or respect for Sun. If Sparc doesn't have an NT port, that's because 'NT is too inexpensive to fit into the Sparc strategy', says Gates. He argued that the beauty of PC economics is volume. 'It's just too damned competitive for Sun to get into volume dynamics,' he said.

Spats aside, both Zander and Gates are banging on about an Internet world, but their plans of how to get there and how it will develop, are very different.

One is convinced that PC power and productivity will keep growing. The other says PC costs outweigh any advantages, particularly with the advent of cheap network computers (NCs) or thin clients. But the importance of the Internet and intranets are common ground, and Java is 'a wonderful language', said Gates.

Mohan of SCO sang the same song: 'Get out there and learn how to use Java.' Like the others, he sees Java as a core technology, along with the Web, NCs and networks.

Similarly, there is broad agreement between the Unix vendors - and Microsoft - that intranets are more important than the Web, and broadband communications need to be developed as quickly as possible. It's time to look forward to a 64-bit future with clustering, massively parallel processors and network-centric Java models.

Zander believes Unix is the best system for networking, and networks are where Unix, Java, IT and business will combine. 'Unix is scalable, secure and tested,' he said.

It is designed for the enterprise, and those Unix vendors such as IBM, Digital, HP and Tandem which staked profits and future growth on Wintel have made a mistake. Their poor quarterly results have been attributed to PC-based technologies, said Zander, adding that, 'no-one is making money from Wintel except Microsoft and Intel'.

'Unix has a heck of a lot of headway left,' claimed Zander, and he may speak for much of the Unix community when he expounds his theories about the direction in which the industry is heading. The base components are in place - the Internet has been commercialised, bandwidth is increasing exponentially and Java resolves many problems that dog PC-based application development and deployment.

The Internet represents a fundamental shift in the way we work. For example an average telephone-based business transaction costs $2 (u1.28), and the same transaction on the Web is about 20 cents.

'Only a few years ago, I'd have talked about workstations and servers,' said Zander, 'but there have been revolutionary changes.' The 'ubiquity of bandwidth' is a worldwide phenomenon, and the future of bandwidth is ATM, cable modems, ISDN and Fast Ethernet. Equally core is Java. 'Write once, run anywhere on anything. Safely,' Zander said.

The $40,000 PC desktop - after three years depreciation, support, administration, management and distribution - makes no financial sense, according to Zander.

SCO's Mohan is as unenthusiastic as Zander about PC economics, but he believes that Wintel won't go away.

Zander was more damning. He claimed: 'Most PC users use less than 15% of Word, and the launch of Windows 95 was the best thing ever for Sun.

It made large corporations ask themselves why are we doing this?'

Both Zander and Mohan said the cost per seat of thin clients is virtually zero, and Zander commented that the cost of the desktop was what was really driving Java.

He said: 'Think thin, think big, think fat. Think clients, think business, think servers. Get the network in place, write in Java, front-end legacies and practise open programming. Prepare for a wireless world.'

It's not all that different from Bill Gates' list of things to do - ISDN, cables, modems, wireless, intranets and Java. All three vendors agree that the costs of PC-dominated systems are driving the Internet.

Gates believes Windows and Unix work well together, and he sees nothing but opportunity and innovation. There is a need for a strong operating system to manage this convergence of systems and technologies, and NT is his obvious choice. But his vision of the future, as presented at Unix Expo, is coloured more by intranets and associated technologies than by operating systems.

Unix vendors are using similar language, and it looks like the users' choice of client - thin or fat - will determine which suppliers assume the mantle of leadership. SCO's Mohan is certain. 'The investment and creativity of many will outperform the investment and creativity of one,' he said.