Re: Alpha remembrance day

Andrew wrote:
The only fantasy here is the Bob Palmer killed Alpha one, the reality
is much more complicated as it generally is and DEC's management before
Palmer had more to do with killing Alpha than Palmer.

I disagree. Prior to Palmer, DEC management failed to grasp may
oppportunities and turned Digital into a legacy uncompetitive vendor
that was trying to milk its existing customers.

Palmer was given an essentially clean *** and he could have fixed the
problems that had gotten DEC into trouble. He could have used Alpha to
essentially relaunch Digital. He had all the tools at his disposal, he
had the power to really change Digital to make it competitive.

Instead, he used the shareholder's goodwill to slightly change the
corporate logo (round dot on the i and slightly different shade of
colour) and when that didn't work, he started to fire people left and
right after every quarterly financial report showing bad news, and also
started to slash the software ecosystem around VMS.

Read up "Elephants CAN Dance" by Lou Gerstner. IBM was in far worse
shape than Digital, yet, Gerstner was able to turn the company around
big time exactly by stopping the slash and burn that had begun just
before him.


Both IBM and Digital had become uncompetitive because of their prices
and attitudes towards customers. Firing a gazillion employees doesn't
magically reduce prices on your price list. But it does prevent you from
making sales when you no longer had a sales force.
.