the fragmentation seen with existing MIPS-based systems that had limited wider adoption of the architecture. Various semiconductor companies, particularly "giants" such as Toshiba and NEC, were perceived as embracing the initiative to establish themselves and to take market share from Intel. DEC used the initiative as an attempt to take market share away from the workstation leader, Sun Microsystems, to respond to gains by Hewlett-Packard and IBM, and to proliferate its own technologies. Compaq, Microsoft and SCO were perceived to be using it as a defensive strategy to prevent "Sun taking over the desktop and replacing Intel-architecture PCs with RISC, Unix SparcStations" with the consequent loss of opportunities for those companies. By joining the initiative, SCO was able to broaden its portfolio to RISC platforms alongside its existing Intel platform products, and Microsoft needed vendor support for its "Portable OS/2", later Windows NT, strategy. The Apache Group Even prior to the announcement of the initiative, a number of companies headed by Compaq and including Siemens, Sony, Silicon Graphics, Unisys and Control Data Corporation favoured the adoption of Unix System V Release 4 (SVR4) as the means to provide portability between the MIPS and Intel architectures. Since SVR4 favoured big-endian operation, this subgroup of members was known as the Apache group, reportedly conceived as a pun on "Big Indian". At that early stage, a different group known as the Gibraltar group, consisting primarily of DEC and SCO, sought to define interoperability with DEC's Ultrix operating system. The Apache group later adopted the name MIPS ABI after the demise of the ACE initiative. The emerging rift within the ACE consortium was averted when it was decided to add support for SVR4 alongside OSF/1, thus placating the group which, by then, included Siemens, Sony, NEC, Prime Computer, Olivetti, Tandem and Pyramid among its members. Although concerns persisted about the domination of the initiative by the founding members, the introduction of SVR4 complicated the position of DEC and SCO whose involvement focused on SCO Open Desktop built on the OSF/1 kernel. However, the availability of SVR4 was regarded as a way of satisfying end-user demand, particularly by Compaq. Dissolution Even so, the ACE initiative (and consortium) began to fall apart little more than a year after it started, as it became apparent that there was not a mass market for an alternative to the Wintel computing platform. The upstart platforms did not offer enough