*NIX: SUN bashed in Survey

The Register comments on a survey about *NIX vendors called Sun ravaged, IBM lauded in Unix server study, which makes SUN look kind of bad, compared to IBM and HP.
There is one fact that needs some extra consideration IMHO, though. Solaris 10™ is a fantastic OS, but it has two drawbacks:

1. It does some things differently


2. It does require more recent hardware

Number one is some kind of drawback because there are usually more flavors of *NIX in a datacenter, means the admins (FYI: those are the overworked, time-starved folks trying to keep everything up and running) need time to integrate it and will only do so if it really pays off in the not so distant future. There is a solid share of machines still running Solaris 8, believe me. The usual practice to install every new incarnation of an OS, so prevalent in the other OS-camp, does not exist in the *NIX world. It even changes, albeit slowly, among the MS-Windows™ user-base, as well. So, *NIX admins have to switch modes, we are talking of the never touch a running system ([my take:] if it does what it should) world, mind you.
Number two is even harder to tackle, most sys-admins do have some kind of staging system for the various *NIX flavors in production, but more than often not the kind I described in my book (in a nutshell: the little brother/sister of the production system). Means they are not able to test-drive and evaluate the OS. Then there are the–smoothly running–production-machines not capable of running Solaris 10; an upgrade would essentially mean getting new hardware, doing burn-ins, testing, installing the software (maybe doing an upgrade), testing again, and, in worst case, rewriting all kinds of scripts and programs to deal with the changed software; think about time-starved and on a low budget.
To cut a long story short: switching to Solaris 10 would mean a lot of effort and re-learning. These are things sys-admins like; it's the reason they took the job. Provided they have the means, budget and time. Go figure!
The fact that most respondents think that SUN will be the dominant supplier of *NIX systems in five years time shows, that the sys-admins would be willing, if supplied with the two things which are usually cut first: man-power and money.
Just my two cents.