I say "I work with computers, mostly for phone companies". I used to do some PC support alongside AIX stuff, and when someone I didn't know particularly well asked me about fixing their PC, I would say something like "Sure, here's the number of the sales guy at work, I'll make sure you get a good deal". Surprisingly, they very rarely called, it was like they just wanted it for free!

A good post, and I agree with pretty much all of it, but it's interesting to see just as we reach the end of "big iron" processors, at least in volume sales, we're seeing the new introduction of micro-servers running low power (and pretty slow) ARM chips. Whether ARM makes a dent in the Intel armour, I'm not so sure, but it's an interesting comparison to Intel x86 vs Sparc and Power in the 80s and 90s.

I started writing a comment on this, then it got a bit out of hand so turned it into a blog post :) http://ewan.to/post/1131323149/linux-on-parity-with-aix However, in short I think yes Linux is largely now in parity with AIX, with the exception of systems larger than 8 processors and 255GB of RAM - for anything else, I think Linux running on a virtualisation platform like VMware is almost certainly the right UNIX to choose.