3. Caldera and SCO

In this imperfect world where we keep cribbing about badly designed OS, the uniting of two super power Operating System to form one OS sounds like a hell of an idea. Or so thought the Caldera Inc from Utah when they took over SCO.  Caldera, a Linux based vendor was taken over by SCO a UNIX software company.

SCO had also partnered with IBM, Intel and Sequent in the 90’s to work on ’project Monterrey’ to combine the UNIX ware OS and IBM’S AIX  to the new Intel Itanium as well as IBM’s Power processor. And as you guessed it, it turned out be a bad mix of all the superpowers.

As Linux rose in popularity, the interest in Itanium decreased and thus all efforts to market the new IBM chip were abandoned. This caused a sidetracking of Caldera by Darl Mcbride.  Under him the company became more focused on litigation than product development. Naturally the sales of its UNIX products went down and everybody in the company had to be fired.

In 2007 SCO filed for bankruptcy protection and thus ended this bad union which could have been a great one.