Re: Alpha remembrance day

Andrew wrote:
"Competing with Wintel" why would you think that Alpha was ever going
to manage that ? It was never going to hit the price points required to
compete with x86. The cheapest Alpha PC's cost $1500

Exactly. Digital had a policy of not selling Alpha PCs competitively
because of a "we can't compete with outselves" situation when Digital
setup its own Wintel division. Where there is a will, there is a way,
and Digital could have made cheap alpha-based PCs if it had wanted to.
(ok, perhaps not as cheap as a Dell machine, but definitely competitive
in the mid to high end desktop PC).

Hang on Palmer started talking to Compaq in 1996 and some time after
Palmer aledgedly started running down the FAB because Compaq didn't
want it.

Are you now suggesting that Palmer somehow guessed that Compaq would
not want the FAB and started running it down before even beginning
negociations with Compaq.


Palmer did not guess. He was told by Pfeiffer. On the Compaq announced
it was buying Digital, Palmer appeared on CNN and bragged about having
begin negotiations 3 years earlier with Pfeiffer who gave him guidance
on what portions of the business Compaq was interested in. Prior to the
downsizing of Digital by Palmer, Digital was too big a fish for Compaq
to swallow. The FAB is but only one business that Palmer got rid of. the
DLT drives is another, the disk drives another, the networking gear is
another and on and on and on.

Furthermore, when you look at Palmer's deals with Microsoft to abandon
his own software to adopt MS software and train the support technicians
on MS software, this was also to give value to the whole support
business with the capability of worldwide support of wintel crap. Why ?
Because in the end, that is what Compaq was interested in. So Palmer
converted the support infrastructure into one which could support wintel
crap so that it would be of value to Compaq.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Alpha remembrance day
    ... The cheapest Alpha PC's cost $1500 ... because of a "we can't compete with outselves" situation when Digital ... Palmer aledgedly started running down the FAB because Compaq didn't ... Palmer did not guess. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: Thoughts on the book: DEC is dead, long live DEC
    ... - and didn't even become an ANSI standard until 1986. ... own technically superior products and that the market would continue to ... You cannot afford NOT to compete head to head ... In the first 2 years of his helm, Palmer did make big changes to Digital ...
    (comp.os.vms)
  • Re: OT: IBM Offering $9-10 Per Share for Sun
    ... At the time this decision was made, Palmer ... was already working to shape Digital so that Compaq could purchase it. ... impact its own relationship with Microsoft once it purchased Digital. ...
    (comp.os.vms)
Loading