You are assuming that the long suffering souls in the niche markets want to jump right into another niche. My opinion is that most of them want to join the mainstream and leave the pains of niche market behind.
Sound like PC-centric myopia to me - all those IT types just
itching to throw off the chains, ditch the pocket protector
for an ipod, and play UT2004.
Sorry but those legacy RISC machines have always worked
for a living. And that work often involves huge investments in
apps, middleware, and organizational methodology tied to
OSes like HP-UX, Tru64, OpenVMS, and NonStop OS. The only
major legacy OSes of note not tied to an IPF future are AIX
and Solaris. AIX is certainly not going x86 while IBM pumps
billions into POWER. And Solaris's importance has been in
serious decline for years as its fate has been too tightly bound
to SPARC's decline. Solaris on AMD64 might have been
an important win for AMD but 1) Sun still seems strangely
fixated with SPARC in the enterprise computing realm, and
2) Solaris on AMD64 *is* Solaris for IA-32E.
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