Over the past decade buyers of low end and mid range servers voted with their pocketbooks for servers based on x86 processors; these systems now account for over 90 percent of all servers priced below $50,000. This shift from proprietary to industry-standard architectures greatly simplified the lives of end users, system suppliers and independent software vendors. End users could acquire software that ran without change on systems from dozens of suppliers. System OEMs no longer had to develop their own processors and support proprietary versions of UNIX that ran on their unique CPU architectures. ISVs could focus their development efforts on just one version of their software, confident in the knowledge that version would allow them to address 90 percent of the available market for their products.
The history of the computer industry clearly demonstrates that proprietary approaches invariably yield to those based on widely accepted de facto and/or de jure industry standards. No one company can innovate as successfully and consistently as a collection of companies working toward a common goal. Industry standards allow software developers to focus their energies on a small number of platforms, leveraging their efforts and increasing their financial returns. Regardless of any short term intermediate swings in performance, price/performance or performance/watt metrics, the end point is clear. Those who recognize and act on this trend it will ultimately prevail over those that deny its inevitability.
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