Re: Alpha remembrance day


Bill Todd wrote:
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.


What a truly ludicrous point. By the time Palmer came on the scene in
1992 Alpha had been a fully funded project since 1989 and was itself a
followon from PRISM. The decisions to design and build Alpha and the
decisions about what OS platforms it would support and what migration
options would be offered to existing customers had already been made.
The only thing Palmer could have done at that point was cancelled the
project.

As a perspective on Alpha from a rather better informed source than you
read the comments made by Michael Slater in an interview in 1992 after
Alpha's announcement.

UPSIDE: We didn't talk much about the Alpha chip. Is it going to be a
world-beater?

SLATER: I don't think so. Alpha is an outstanding piece of technology.
It is probably superior architecture to the architectures that exist,
but I don't believe the differences are big enough to overcome the fact
that it is very late entering the market. There is an enormous amount
of inertia and software base that DEC has to fight. Every company that
DEC goes out to convince to make Alpha chips or to build systems with
Alpha, every one of those companies over the last few years has been
pitched by Sun for Sparc, pitched by Mips, then HP for PA RISC, then
pitched by IBM for RS/6000.

How precient of him the reasons for the death of Alpha spelt out in
1992 just after its launch.


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.


Lack of velocity seems to be a trait that you are suffering from. DEC's
inability to choose a project and stick to it, their lateness and the
stop gap tactic of doing a MIPS based platform lost them momentum,
market share, customer and ISV loyalty. When Alpha came out it was too
late entering as it did a market that was now crowded with other RISC
processors competing for ISV and design wins, DEC were unprofitable and
had lost their status as the alternative to IBM to Sun and HP.

Ever heard of the phrase Honeymoon Period

Alpha benefited from a relatively brief honeymoon influenced by its
newness, its support for 64bit and its speed. The honeymoon quickly
ended when the underlying issues of ISV support, customer loyalty,
market share etc which were all caused by Digitals actions in the 7 or
so years leading up to the Alpha release.

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.


Of course it could see above. When customers, partners etc no longer
see you as a safe pair of hands because of previous product and
strategy mishaps then the chances of your latest and greatest product
in this case Alpha being a sucess are significantly diminished.


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.

Trust, momentum, 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).


Of course it did, but by the mid 80's when the events that sealed
Alpha's fate started to unfold Digital was the alternative to IBM.

I have snipped the rest of your response because you clearly don't get
the point and sadly you never will. Regretably this means that
unsuspecting readers in 10 years time are likely to be subject to more
Gound Hog Day type ramblings on your part about the Alphacide and
Palmer, Curly's and Carly's part in it.

Regards
Andrew Harrison

.

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