Re: OpenVMS Seminar in Toronto (2005-02-24) a few points

From: JF Mezei (_at_teksavvy.com\\)
Date: 02/28/05 

Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 12:18:31 -0500

Robert Deininger wrote:
> 1. VMS sales have been growing modestly.
> 2. Tru64 sales have been falling.
> 3. Alphaserver sales have been falling, not growing.

If VMS sales are growing during a period where VMS is not shipping for
IA64, it means that demand for Alpha is also growing, in terms of the
VMS marketplace.

And now that VMS is shipping for that IA64 thing, I bet HP will more
than ever hide any real hard statistic on IA64 server sales vs Alpha
sales and will especially not want to reveal any information that would,
like for Pa-Risc, reveal that the old platform is still outselling the
IA64 thing.

> I'm talking about the actual design as it exists today.

You are finding excuses where there are none. It isn't as if this were
Digital that built only Alphas, where a single change in the cabinet
would require all the stuff you described, and changing the colour of
the plastic would require 10 years of R&D and millions of dollars in
colour pigmentation research and how it interacts with the plastic.

HP has it now. HP already has cheaper enclosures that have already been
tested, developped, painted with colour chosen etc etc etc.

HP already has power supplies that are known to work, have alreayd been
tested, purchased, negotiated lower prices etc etc.

And we're not talking about proprietary Q-BUS or Unibus here, we're
talking about standard SCSI, IDE and PCI, right ?

> The enclosure was
> designed several years ago. It isn't going to change now. So the cost is
> pretty much fixed.

Fine, lets accept this for a minute. If you initially priced the units
with an expected lifetime of 2 years and 10,000 shipments, you'd spread
the costs of the R&D over those 10,000 units.

Now, extend the life of the unit by say another 5,000 units over 3
years, and since your R&R has already been paid by tyhe first 10,000
units, you can afford to lower the price of the units quite a bit, even
though the actual manufacturing may still be more expensive than
building wintel.

Now, add to this the fact that you are no longer spending any R&D on
Alpha and all you need is simple fabbing by a 3rd party. That is the
chip equivalent of going to some shops to have t-shirts imprinted with
your own pre-designed logo.

> told the black LK463 keyboard uses different molds than the off-white
> predecessor, just because the color change makes the plastic different.

Was this on April 1 by any chance ? It is more likely that they used a
different mold not because of colour change, but because of a new design
of keyboard. It isn't as if HP only does keyboard for Alpha systems,
they have tons of experience and existing designs for keyboards. There
is no need to spend tons of money to re-invent the wheel when you ahev a
wheel next door available.

> And then the paint that's silk-screened onto the key caps had to change
> also. Just a simple example.

Agian, both HP and Compaq had plenty of experience with this and this
shoudl be a no brainer, unless Digital portion chose to design keyboard
with fancy materials never used before for keyboards.

> Ah, maybe I misunderstood the question. Well, for alpha vs. itanium, same
> quantity of CPUs ordered, there's a big difference in price. There's a
> single vendor for each chip, so HP can't take the business elsewhere.

Wrong. HP can and has had Alphas FABbed from different sources,
including Intel and IBM and could probably go to Samsung as well. HP can
only buy the IA64 chips from Intel (both the design and FABbing)

> That's the reality today; once Digital got out of the CPU fabricating
> business, this sort of lock-in for Alpha CPUs was pretty inevitable.

Wrong. CPUs consist of both the design of the logo, and the simple
process of putting the logo on tshirts.

It is the design that is the most important part. Once you have the
design done, you can go to any plane that will silkscreen it onto your t-shirts.

And this same applies to Pa-Risc. HP is still working on a Pa-Risc desgn
and whill have it FABbed by whoever it wants. Same with Sun.

> Different design decisions for the bricks led to different costs, and
> after the inevitable markup, different prices for customers.

Yep, like the 155meg RD54s selling for CAD $9000 at a time when you
could get a gig drive for a few hundred dollars.

Your mentality is what killed Digital. When products are no longer state
of the art, you can still sell them if you lower the price. Had Digital
lowered the price of existing VAXes, it could have competed against Sun
and Apollo (now HP) because the cost per MIOPS would have been competitive.

But like the RD54, Digital kept its prices high at a time when the
market proces had dropped so much.

With an agin DS15 product, HP could lower the margins and still sell
them. It is far better to keep your VMS customer and perhaps grow the
VMS customer base than to lose them.

You are better off with a customer who continues to buy Alphas than a
customer who decides to migrate to IBM or SUn or Dell and dump VMS.

The alst Alpha sale will essenmtially be a big nail in VMS' coffin,
unless HP can stop the tide of bad news about IA64 between now and next
year, and that airn't going to happen because those bad news are part of
a strategy/trend started last year when Intel was forced to start
producing 64 bit 8086s.

> If you could take the disk drive bay from (for example) an rx2600 and use
> it in (for example) a DS15, there would be some money-saving options. But
> of course they aren't interchangable,

Excuse me ????

The DSxx machines were built well after Digital had decided to stop
forcing customers to buy proprietary Digital drives. I really cannot
understand why one couldn't put industry standard drives in them.

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