Messages in this thread |  | | From | John Kennedy <> | Date | Wed, 19 May 1999 12:12:58 -0700 | Subject | Re: Plan-9 is definitely _NOT_ a failure (Re: Ken Thompson interview in IEEE Computer magazine (fwd)) |
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On Wed, May 05, 1999 at 08:57:34AM -0500, John Fulmer wrote: > I knew I would have to put on the fireproof undies for that one :) ... > My actual meaning of "failure" is that of Ken Thompson's meaning of "not > successful": Plan9 is not and will not be a commercial success. It's not > marketed and little used in the business sector. At any rate, it never > took off like it was hoped. > > Technically, I understand Plan 9 is a very elegant and well done design...
Once upon a time, just before Plan9 was released to Universities, I went to a USENIX microkernel conference up in Seattle where Plan9 was being compared against Mach, NT (!) and a few other popular kernels of the time.
The first half-day was factual, with various people giving factual stats about their kernels, overhead, footprint, etc. Then the microsoft droid came on and gave us a sales pitch! Marketing slides, the whole nine yards -- totally non-technical, total drivel. Compared to all the previous presentations, it was totally off-topic.
At that point, the people from AT&T had already proven that they were going to be lively and interesting from their introductory talks, and I didn't want to ditch because you could see that the AT&T guys were up to something -- they were whispering to themselves and running around drawing on slides.
When it came time for AT&T to talk about Plan9, they had added a whole new microsoft-slamming forward. One of them had hand-drawn a sales chart (fat line down the `0' axis since they were giving it away), expected growth (moderate), revenue (0), etc. He finished the intro by welcoming microsoft into the 60's as I recall, and then got on with his prepared presentation. (:
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