Re: Alpha remembrance day
- From: "Andrew" <andrew_harrison@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 20 Jul 2006 09:45:05 -0700
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 systemsCan you say "incompetent blowhard?" I think David addressed that latter
to run on it"?
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.
And you follow that by rolling out the same old blame it on Palmer,
Curly and Carly nonsense. How hugely ammusing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Phase V DECNet being a classic example. Perhaps it is indicative of how
bad this strategy was that the ICL were only company apart from DEC who
invested so much time and effort trying to get customers to use a
largely paper OSI standard as opposed to a completely real set of
de-facto standards.
One major utility in the UK an ICL mainframe/DEC mid tier customer
pinned their platform interoperability standards to the Phase V/OSLAN
mast only to discover that when both vendors finaly shipped working
versions (years late) that they did not interoperate.
Result more customers defect and ISV's who are asked to support DECNET
as opposed to TCP/IP by DEC because of what apears to be religious
conviction simply don't bother.
5. TCP/IP vs DECNET. Lunacy on DEC's part resulting in a number of
small companies such as TGV making good money supplying a key platform
component which DEC through mistaken religious conviction refused to
support.
6. DEC refused to pay salespeople commision cutting DEC off from the
brightest and most creative technology sales people and leading to an
exodus of skilled DEC sales reps to companies like HP, Sun, IBM etc who
were quite happy to reward large sales with large commission checks.
Sun, IBM, HP etc also rewarded ISV sales teams in the same way giving
sales teams an incentive to work vary closely with their ISV partners.
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.
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.
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.
HP woed SAP and excluded VMS from the R3 platform.
New entrants to the market such as Baan, Seibel, Retek either simply
didn't bother with the new improved Digital corporation or had a
Digital platform as a second or third tier port. Digital through
indecision, poor market awareness and simple hubris had ceased to be
relevant to most ISV's.
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.
NT on Alpha is and was a red herring, Digital with its track record of
losing ground in the ISV community was never going to create enough
momentum/interest to get x86/NT ISV's to port to Alpha. FX!32 far from
being the solution became part of the problem because it ment that
Digital apparently didn't need to bother. Curly's axing of the Win64
program was inevitable and without a doubt the right decision.
It is fashionable to blame Palmer, Curly etc for the demise of DEC and
Alpha but the reality is that the hole had already been dug they just
made it slightly deeper.
Why keep on rolling out the same trite challenged arguments to try and
blame the Alpha demise on more recent managment when it is clear that
they simply made an dire situation slightly worse.
Regards
Andrew Harrison
1. One of the key reasons for the decline in the Alpha business was
as the previous poster quite rightly stated the lack of software.
Ah, well - taking a week off from debating with uninformed morons can be
very relaxing, but they're usually right where you left them when you
come back.
For the edification of the educable (a group which history suggests does
not number you as a member), the main reasons for the decline of Alpha were:
1. The Great Palmer Contraction - the transformation of DEC from a
forward-looking aggressive (though not always ideally-focused)
competitor to a multiple-amputee just trying to remain afloat. No one
on the inside mistook this for anything but what it was, so it seems
unlikely to have been missed by a lot of customers.
2. The infamous mid-'90s 'affinity' program (a Wes Melling Production
IIRC), which encouraged the VMS community to switch to NT on Alpha - a
great way to turn much of a loyal and robust customer base into a
combination of skittish stalwarts and disenchanted ex-users, and to
stall the growth of a leading OS without much compensating return (NT on
Alpha never having come close to taking up the resulting slack).
3. The drastic loss of VMS development momentum at the end of the '90s
(more handwriting on the wall for Alpha's primary OS for those paying
attention). When 'supporting new hardware' becomes the main attraction
of new releases rather than vigorous evolution of OS features in their
own right to keep pace with the evolving OS competition, the new trend
line is clear.
4. The Slough of Despond which Alpha entered immediately after Curly's
ascension to the throne, when both performance increases and new
releases slowed to a crawl and allowed other platforms to challenge what
had until then been the unquestioned industry performance leader. What
better way to get people wondering about the real level of commitment of
a corporation to an architecture? Well, one could have been
5. The butchering of Win64 (and Windows in general) on Alpha in August,
1999 - another Curly brain-fart which managed to call Alpha's future
into such question that the infamous "Commitment to Alpha" letter had to
be written in an attempt to quell customer fears.
6. The Unix vacillations which first embraced MIPS as the corporate
Unix platform and then haltingly switched to Alpha after that damage had
been done. It took Digital Unix sales years to recover, but recover
they eventually did: while Tru64 had only about 1/3 the market share of
AIX, or HP-UX, or Solaris as of Y2K, it was growing far faster than any
of them and threatening to overtake VMS revenues until
7. The Alphacide, of course - a fine way to kill such a resurgence.
The fact that DECpaq's Alpha system business remained one of its most
profitable hardware franchises despite those first six major handicaps,
and that its Tru64 business eventually attained robust growth, is a
testament to Alpha's (and its OSs') continuing perceived strength and
potential in the eyes of customers and their willingness to try to
leverage them. Perhaps a 'lack of applications' was some part (along
with the other problems noted above) of what kept Tru64 from growing at
*more* than the 30% annual rate it was achieving shortly prior to the
Alphacide, but it sure as hell wasn't contributing to anything
resembling a 'decline' in either absolute or market-share terms.
- bill
.
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