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TPM reports in Sun Asks ISVs Why They Love Solaris about a recent study about the ISV support of Solaris. Interesting read. But the last sentence is the best:

And for those ISVs who watched as Sun let other platform vendors eat its lunch from 2001 through 2004, eroding server market share and bringing Solaris to the brink of market irrelevance, the run from 2005 through 2007 must have given Solaris ISVs the sense that Sun was back in the game and they could rely on Solaris as a business once again as much as customers have always relied on Solaris as a rock-solid operating system.

Paul Murphy about his findings about the software lists of Sun and IBM:

Or, if you prefer to see the glass as half empty: the chances that the lack of a critical application forces you into a risky and expensive development or porting project are at least ten times greater with AIX/Power than with Solaris/SPARC

The basic point behind Murphys article it the problem, that the numbers can´t be compares. IBM counts different than Sun, Sun different than HP, HP different than Redhat, and so on. I would like to see a definitive set of rules to measure ISV support, somewhat like a SPECisvsupport.

I would suggest the following rules: To count as an application for such a number, the application has to be available as a binary, it has to be fully supported on the os version by an ISV or by the vendor of the OS. In case of the emulation of an older os version, the application counts only when the software is supported in the emulation. The application version must be available for new deployments (after EOL, but before EOSL doesn´t count). As a second number, i would suggest a "known to work" benchmark, which removes the "has to be supported" condidtions from the first ruleset.

Without such an ruleset, the ISV numbers are "indicative, but not definitive" as Paul stated in a comment to his article.