“Compaq Business Critical Server Division general manager Bill
Heil has written a letter to customers reaffirming the company’s
commitment to Alpha “for the long term.” This sort of thing is
frequently the kiss of death for whatever it is a corporation is
reaffirming its commitment to, but in this case the letter helps
put some flesh on a strategy that Compaq has looked like it’s
making up at it goes along.”
“Heil gets more interesting when he gets on to Linux.
Segmenting the product lines between Intel at low-to-middle and
Alpha at the top would be simple enough, but it’s more complex than
that. “We will drive Alpha volumes by leveraging the growth of
Linux,” he says. That tallies with what Tim Yeaton was telling us
about Linux-Tru64 co-existence the other day (Compaq aims Alpha at
high end). Compaq can pitch Tru64 Alpha as the mission-critical,
high-availability, highly scalable server platform while selling
Linux Alpha workstations to run with it. We’re not sure
“leveraging” is a word entirely appropriate to the spirit of open
source, but there you are.”