Re: Why did VMS users go along with the itanium farce?

From: JF Mezei (jfmezei.spamnot_at_teksavvy.com)
Date: 09/30/05 

Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 19:46:57 -0400

Keith Parris wrote:
> VMS customers as a whole don't believe what the doom-and-gloomers here
> say.

Yep. Reminiscent of when Gerstner got into IBM and found plenty of
studies showing IBM customers were quite happy with IBM and which
provided no explantion of why IBM was losing ground against competition.
Reason: those surveys only looked
at remaining customers who were happy with IBM.

If you want VMS to grow, if you to see "stale" VMS customers to start
spending money on VMS again, then you need to look at the big picture,
not just selective polling of happy customers.

If the HP apoligists were to admit to the problems faced by VMS and tell
us that VMS management are tackling those problems , you'd see a lot
less complaining here. But as long as you continue to paint a rosey
picture, we do not have confidence that VMS management are even aware of
perception problems and thus aren't even trying to fix those problems.

> VMS customers as a whole are making reasoned, logical choices, based on
> observed facts, not wild speculation.

Yep. AS A WHOLE, VMS customers have long ago decided to switch to other
platforms. The VMS marketplace is today, but a fraction of what it used
to be.

> Itanium has turned out to be a reasonable chip, with ECC in all the
> right places, and good design for reliability.

IA64 has been relegated to a niche market, low volume. No matter what
its technical specs are, it will not help VMS come back to life and grow
again. VMS desperatly needs to be on a mainstream architecture.

Stope justifying Curly/Carly's decisions to go to IA64, think about the
future of VMS and on which platform it would have most success.

> It has the support of the
> world't largest microprocessor manufacturer.

Yep. For the past 20 months, Intel has been narrowing IA64'Ss prospects
to just the high end supercomputers, down from initial promises it would
replace the 8086 as industry standard commodity architecture. Intel, who
had been saying 64 bit was reserved to IA64 did an about face and built
a 64 bit 8086. YOu really think that there is such widespread support
from Intel ?

People want a growing platform that is not relegated to a niche, they
want a platform that is mainstream and without rumours of its demise
constantly circulating.

> (up to 128 processors in a Superdome). The HP Integrity server boxes
> have the traditional high quality you'd expect from an HP box:
> well-made, solid, well-engineered.

Same can be said of HP's 8086 boxes, althought they do not yet scale to
128 processors (a small market).

> The hardware costs less than Alpha hardware.

 That is such a lame excuse. Had HP wanted, it could have built Alpha
boxes with same components that costed the same. It just decided to
continue to build with 1990s Digital designs.

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