Re: Alpha remembrance day

Andrew wrote:
Lets see, Palmer inherited a loss making company, a failing VAX 9000
project, Alpha the soup to nuts "Industry Standard" 64 bit processor,
the Hudson and UK FABS, a UNIX strategy that was in tatters, and Phase
V DECNET.

The 9000 was not a "bet the company" product, nor a strategy product. It
was an attempt at one technology and it didn't pan out. Its failure to
impress and sell did not hurt Digital in the long term.

Alpha showed great promise and was very respected as a design and
technical potential. The business aspects happened all during palmer's tenure.

The FABs were at the time, a good idea, and had Digital been able to
commercialise them, they could have been a success. When you look at
DEC's disk drive business, they were starting to catch on, but since
Compaq wasn't interested in disk drive business, DEC was told by
Pfeiffer to sell it. Same with the networking division.

Nobody is saying that Palmer inherited a healthy company. But at that
time, it was still quite possible to turn DEC around and make it
competitive and most importantly, fix the problems instead of selling
any limb that had a problem.

In terms of Phase V, while it is today quite moot, remember that at the
time it was launched, governments were mandating OSI compatibility, and
DEC was one of the first ones to market. Where DEC failed is in quickly
switching to TCPIP when the later replaced OSI as the "internetworking"
stack of choice. So yeah, DECNET 5 was a big waste of money, but other
companies also wasted money on trying to comply with governments
mandates to have OSI stacks. The difference is that the other guys
already had good TCPIP connectivity, VMS didn't.

In fact, DEC's biggest mistake when it became obvious that OSI and X.400
wouldn't pan out was to compete against Multinet instead of just
adopting Multinet as the de-facto standard stack on VMS and truly
integrate it with VMS with some sort fo join t venture or outright
purchase of TGV. (TGV later went to Cisco, so it would have been to
DEC's advantage to buy it).


changes in the Computing market, the rise of the PC and the rise of the
UNIX Server/Workstation.

In terms of the rise of Unix, DEC failed to use marketing to really
outline the fact that Unix wasn't "standard" and that it was quite
different from vendor to vendor and that VMS was just as "compatible"
and to push that fact to negate the negative advertising made on
"proprietary systems". It could have been done, it wasn't done. VMS
flaundered because of that.


remotely close to a clean *** made his chances of sucess highly
unlikely.

At the time Olsen was asked to retire/leave, the board should have moved
to find a REAL leader capable of turning Digital around. I can't wait to
receive my copy of DEC Is dead, Long live DEC (it's on its way :-) to
see if there is any explanation on the choice of Palmer. In the
"Elephants can dance" book, Gerstner spends a lot of time explaining how
IBM courted him for a long while.

IBM was much worse off and make far more radical changes to its
philosophy than DEC did. Had there been a truly competant leader instead
of Palmer, I think Digital might have bought Compaq instead of the other
way around.
.