welch@TUT.CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Arun Welch) (09/14/88)
Sorry for the delay in getting this out... On the whole, I'd echo Christopher's comments on the trade show. It was much smaller than previous years, and it was interesting to see who wasn't there: BBN, Intellicorp, to name some of the big ones. I think the trade show really peaked with the Philly show, and has been sort of winding down since then, probably because all the vendors are in a retrenchment mode. The quality of the giveaways showed this too. Personnally, I think this is a bit of a good thing, it was getting kinda gaudy. I didn't stay for the whole conference, so I don't know if there were any huge parties like there have been in previous years, either [what? People go to these things for professional reasons? Gee! :-)]. I guess the big news for this list is the split-off of Envos from Xerox. Envos employees own 85%, Xerox owns 10%, and Rank Xerox owns 5%. Envos has a variety of rights to the software, ranging from full ownership to shared rights with Xerox. Envos also has rights to research at PARC, EuroPARC, Fuji, and the University Grants program. The primary direction for the company seems to be not so much just a software environment but also consulting, development of systems for customers, and so on. It'll be interesting to see if they'll make it. Personally, I hope they do, I kinda like the environment. A major difference I noticed between Envos and Xerox AIS was that they're much more interested in workin with customers demands. We're all familiar with what happened to most of our suggestions/requests for features, which couldn't be handled due to the enormous inertia of Xerox, and having to get things to go up and down the corporate ladder. I'm not seeing that in Envos. I hope this behaviour continues, since that inertia was really hurting them as XAIS. Did anyone on the list go to the UG meeting on wed? Due to a mixup there ended up being two meetings, and I couldn't make the second one. The NeXT machine is being unveiled on Oct 12th, it would be interesting to see what impact it has on the field, if any. Most of the vendors out there seem to be targeting their software to more general-purpose machines, I wonder if Lispm's are in their sunset years. I suspect that there will always be a demand for bigger, faster lispms, but I suspect that as AI gets absorbed into the mainstream, more and more people are going to want it on their unix/pick-your-OS boxes. It should be interesting to see where the world goes. ...arun
welch@TUT.CIS.OHIO-STATE.EDU (Arun Welch) (09/14/88)
Well, apparently I misunderstood the business about research rights that Envos has from PARC etc. I'll double-check on what the issues really are, and report back here (unless, of course, an official statement is made by Envos or Xerox :-). ...arun