[rogerbinns]

I worked on X.Desktop at IXI. All the Unix workstation vendors (and I mean all of them) had us port X.Desktop to their Unix systems. We had over 20 varieties of Unix systems in our office including Sony workstations, IBM, HP, Motorola, Sun, DEC etc. X.Desktop ensured a workstation had a graphical desktop in multiple languages (English, French, German, Japanese), as there was no alternative except Looking Glass briefly. SCO bought IXI to ensure continued and expanded support for their platform. Over 95% of our business was on the RISC platforms, especially Sun workstations. The standard Motif source also had many bugs we fixed so that was an important part of the business. Other than OEM deals, a lot of our customer base was all the Wall Street companies, Government agencies, Oil Companies and others that used Unix workstations and applications.

CDE (Common Desktop Environment) was announced which cratered our sales for a while, but it took quite a bit before CDE shipped. In the meantime Microsoft Windows took off as an alternative to Unix workstations, and especially the release of Windows NT meant that the graphical software than ran on Unix moved to Windows, and the Unix workstation market came to an end.

IXI pivoted to software making Windows and Unix work together well, and then did Tarantella - a web based environment for interacting with graphical applications. SCO sold off its Unix business to Caldera (who sued IBM ...) and renamed itself Tarantella. Tarantella was later bought by Sun, and Sun was bought by Oracle. Oracle owns the X.Desktop source code. None of the source was used in later products.