Re: Alpha remembrance day

Andrew wrote:
Bill Todd wrote:
Andrew wrote:
Bill Todd wrote:
etmsreec@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Well, that's one view.
Can
you say "lack of applications"? Can you say "lack of operating systems
to run on it"?
Can you say "incompetent blowhard?" I think David addressed that latter
chimera adequately, and given that one of said OSs was Windows
(including support of x86 application binaries) I'd say that puts the
former to rest as well (not to say that VMS and Tru64 didn't have
adequate application support in their own right, of course).

I read this post with some amusement for a number of reasons.
Unfortunately, overlooking probably the best one - for which you would
have had to have been looking in a mirror.


Really.

Of course, Andrew: unlike you, I don't bluster interminably about things I know little or nothing about - I rely more on fact.


And you follow that by rolling out the same old blame it on Palmer,
Curly and Carly nonsense. How hugely ammusing.

I sincerely hope that your spelling ability (or lack thereof) as evidenced over your years here is not characteristic of the quality of England's educational system: it's discouraging enough that the U.S.'s is so bad.


The sad reality is that Alphas woes and eventual demise may have been
exacerbated or at least allowed to get worse by Palmer/Curly etc but
the seeds for Alphas decline were sown by DEC and their senior
management in the 80's before any of your favourite culprits were in
the frame.

Now, that would be quite a feat, wouldn't it? Since Alpha didn't even *appear on the scene* until Palmer was in charge (1992), and obviously didn't reach its peak market penetration until considerably thereafter (I suspect not long before the Alphacide), dating the start of its *decline* earlier than its birth is - well, pretty typical of the level of intelligence that you usually display, I guess.


1. DEC failed to catch the RISC wave first time around, not through
lack of projects but through lack of direction. Not 1 but 4 and bit
projects were started and cancelled by DEC, Titan, SAFE, HR-32, CASCADE
and finally PRISM which metamophosed out of CASCADE. This is one of a
number of examples which illustrate what a massive understatement your
"(though not always ideally-focused) " comment is.

This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI/MIPS.

But of course (as I already noted above, but since you're both rather slow on the uptake and obstinate in your ignorance it bears repeating), this could not possibly have caused Alpha's *decline*, since Alpha wouldn't even appear for a few years yet.


2. Having belatedly realised that VAX wasn't going to survive the
onslaught of the RISC processors DEC initiated the short lived MIPS
platform running Ultrix a plaform seriously hampered by the fact that
DEC had not only missed catching the RISC wave but had also failed to
catch the UNIX wave as well. DEC sales people prefered selling VMS/VAX
and senior management openly denigrated UNIX while funding a product
division to develop it. Sounds mad now.

This lost DEC market share to Sun, HP, IBM and SGI who had no such
qualms about selling UNIX.

But (yet again) this couldn't possibly have contributed to the *decline* of a product which had not even been introduced yet. In fact, if anything it gave Alpha a lower starting point from which regaining lost market share might have been easier than beginning with more of it.


3. Having managed to create an ecosystem for Ultrix/MIPS DEC started
the Alpha development project in 1989 with no real intentions of
porting Ultrix to Alpha or providing any remotely sensible migration
path from Ultrix to Tru64.

So what? Once again, this (debatable) intent at Alpha's birth could not possibly have caused it to *decline* - it could at worst have limited its growth (and indeed did for years in the Unix marketplace, as I already observed). Idiot.


The Alpha introduction in 1992 with the inevitable Ultrix demise that
followed left all DEC's partners in the Ultrix/MIPS ecosystem
floundering, customers ran for the hills hotly pursued by sales teams
from Sun, IBM, HP, SGI etc waving blank order forms. (See sales
peoples commision later)

Since I already observed that the Unix vacillations you describe above contributed to a slow ramp-up for Tru64 on Alpha, I'm really not sure what your regurgitation was meant to accomplish (though it seems clear that whatever it may have been, it had nothing to do with your ridiculous contention that Alpha 'declined' due to lack of applications rather than simply had an up-hill battle to fight on the Unix front due to earlier missteps by DEC).


4. DEC started out as an alternative to IBM but ended up becoming a
mini IBM without the deep pockets or market share. DEC history is
littered with strategies that apparently had nothing to do with what
customers were asking for and everything to do with what DEC though
customers wanted.

Actually, most of 'DEC history' (up through at least the early '80s, which is well over half of its 40-year span) is a testament to how well one can succeed by listening to customers and trying to give them what they need. And the suggestion that DEC 'started out as an alternative to IBM' simply reflects your own ignorance (or possibly incompetent exposition): DEC began life as a module vendor, not a computer manufacturer at all, blossomed by addressing smaller, interactive computing markets that IBM largely ignored, and only began encroaching significantly on IBM's territory after VAX appeared (while DEC's earlier 36-bit mainframes overlapped IBM's offerings in capabilities, they tended to be sold with a significantly different viewpoint).

I've snipped a good deal of your subsequent babble, since it's even less related to the subject at hand than your earlier drivel was. But I've left your summary paragraph for the opportunity to remind you once again...

Every single one of these decisions was made prior to Palmer, Curly or
Carly and every single one had the effect of reducing DEC's relevance
with ISV's and direcly impacting DEC's third party software portfolio.

.... that events such as these which predated Alpha's debut could not possibly have precipitated some subsequent *decline* (a 'decline' by definition starting from some high point).


The net of this and a whole load of other struggling projects such as
the 9000 series was that by 1992 when Palmer took over the reins DEC
were a shambles. They had just posted their first quarterly loss
followed by their first annual loss.

And Alpha was their hope for recovery - as it turned out quite a reasonable hope (given the industry's admiration for it) until Palmer et al. additionally screwed things up rather than set things straight. Only Pfeiffer, during his very brief ownership of the product, attempted to realize its potential.


ISV's didn't trust them. Key partners such as Oracle who had used DEC
platforms for development and as a primary port had moved mostly to Sun
and the ISV landscape had changed from an environment where most ISV's
used DEC platforms for development to one where 60+% were using Sun.

Yup - nothing like a bottom-of-the-barrel starting-point to give an architecture the opportunity to make impressive gains: Alpha had nowhere to go but up, and indeed did so (despite being hobbled in many respects) for most of its life prior to the Alphacide.

....

Had Alpha been introduced with a sensible Ultrix migration plan or even
running Ultrix as Sun had done with SunOS and SPARC and had DEC not
apparently wilfully shrunk their ISV software portfolio then it is
possible that Alpha/UNIX could have captured the 20-30% of the UNIX
market once commanded by Ultrix.

But as it was, it had to recover the ground solely on its merits against significant odds. So it took a while, but (as I already noted but which you seem eager to ignore) eventually Alpha and Tru64 proved sufficiently compelling that they were considered the premier Unix platform from the standpoints of both leading-edge implementation and performance (as well as offering very competitive costs of ownership) and were growing far faster than their larger competition right up until the Alphacide.

That's not a 'decline', Andrew: that's *growth*, and impressive (up to 30% annual) growth at that. Too bad DEC's $3 billion annual Tru64 system business in Y2K (plus the existing, though more static, $4 billion annual VMS system business) doesn't fit the myth that you're attempting to promulgate.

And that, of course, pretty much says it all: in order to blame something for a 'decline', one must first establish that a decline was in fact taking place. And while its owners placed plenty of obstacles in Alpha's path between the mid-'90s and the Alphacide, they never managed to send it into the dive that you're so blithely assuming occurred: it took a final act of murder to accomplish that.

- bill
.

Relevant Pages

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