That is, of course, if you simply add up the revenue you get from
selling Applixware/AXP.
Now, I think at least with RedHat Linux, there is a certain amount of
revenue on the Intel side you only make because you also provide ALPHA
and or Sparc versions. The main reason that my Pentium is running RedHat
is that my ALPHA is running RedHat, and I like to keep it nice and
consistent.
Similarly, there is probably people out there who will standardize their
Intel machines on whatever office software becomes available for ALPHA
first --- be that StarOffice, the WordPerfect suite or Applixware.
And considering the significant cost of well-performing ALPHA hardware,
there is quite a good chance that these people are in decision making
positions; The revenue for selling Intel versions that is due to such
standardization could be many times that of selling the ALPHA version;
It is still revenue that is directly due to releasing an ALPHA version.
Also, in my experience porting a packet to many different platforms
(and especially porting it to a platform with different assumptions about
the basic size of fundamental data types, and different C and maths
libraries) will significantly improve the code quality even on the original
architecture --- a typical application contains numerous bugs which "just
happen" not to cause any negative effect on a particular platform and will
thus go unnoticed ---- and they are bugs all the same.
>Everyone interested in Linux should applaud making Applixware
>available for Intel machines (a market which is substantially larger
>then the Alpha market) rather then beating them up for not providing
>and Alpha port.
Oh, no doubt about that --- it's nice to have the choice of several
office type applications; The day is very near where I will advise
casual computer users to use linux rather than Windows95. However,
it just doesn't feel right to have this hyperfast ALPHA machine and
still run the word processor on another machine.....
Bernie
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