Re: Alpha remembrance day

Andrew wrote:

....

Why keep repeating the same sorry tired mantra ?

I'm sorry that you seem to find the truth tiresome, moron - but as you ought to be able to divulge from some of the material to which you responded, you're not an audience that I care about.


Alpha grew initially because it was new, it was quick and with things
like the VEST program it was relatively easy to move apps from VAX/VMS
to Alpha/OpenVMS. It died because the mistakes made by DEC prior to
Alpha's introduction created a climate in which it could not attract
enough software or market share to sustain it after the honeymoon of
the initial introduction.

Sure, Andrew - the honeymoon period explains it all, just like it did with Itanic's initial acceptance (not) - despite the ease with which IA32 software could run there without even something like VEST being necessary.


Alpha sales initially went up to a pretty reasonable 10-12% market
share, fell in the latter half of the 1990's to below 5%

For the reasons I suggested, of course - reasons based on actual events rather than on your 'honeymoon' fantasy.

and then
started to rise.

Yet another blow to your fantasy, which offers no explanation whatsoever for such a turn-around.

By the time Alpha did start to claw back share it was
too late,

Too late for *what*, idiot? Too late to rise? But you just admitted that they *were* rising, despite at best luke-warm support from Compaq.

consolidation, industry standard platforms

Surely an ex-Sun bigot like you considers Unix to qualify as such a standard, and (not entirely by coincidence) Tru64 on Alpha was growing far faster than its Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX competition during that period.

But, again, that doesn't fit the fantasy you're attempting to pawn off, so by all means let's not deal with it.

....

When
you are 3rd or 4th in a market which has 5 or 6 vendors things look
much better than when you are 4th out of 4.

Don't assume that your audience is as incompetent as you are, Andrew. When you enter a market later than the competition, it takes time to catch up (especially when your early steps are as compromised by ambiguity as Alpha's early Unix steps were). There's nothing wrong with being 4th out of 4 as long as your growth rate promises a better position in the future and as long as you're profitable. Both were true of Alpha and Tru64.

Since you so clearly don't have a clue about what happened to Alpha in the first place, it's not worth confronting your inane suggestions for how it might have been handled better at all.

- bill
.

Relevant Pages

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