Re: Alpha remembrance day

JF Mezei schrieb:


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.

IIRC the 9000 was a mainframe class box and thus certainly
sucked up considerable resources that could have been spent
better, e.g. for a timely and consistent introduction of
an alpha ecosystem. It's another example for the failed
attempt of DEC to be like IBM, while they had only 1/10
of their resources.

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

yeah, promise, and that's it. Technical merits are nothing
if the time window for broad introduction has closed.
Somewhere in my electronic attic I have an article of 1992
with Michael Slater who said exactly that: nice try,
but too late.

The FABs were at the time, a good idea,

No it wasn't. It was another example of DECs hybris:
"we are so great, we can do everything on our own".

and had Digital been able to
commercialise them, they could have been a success.

Sun and SGI succeeded better without fabs.

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.

IIRC that happened when DEC still existed.
And too me (and most others) was another sign of DEC heading
for their final collapse.

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.

I wonder how other companies without a strong OSI committment
could have done business with government at that time.

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.

Now that certainly is big blunder on DECs part
(and happened before Palmer). How long does it take
to integrate a TCP/IP stack into on OS ?
All other non-Unices (including even AmigaOS) accomplished that
in a couple of months. DEC an their f'ups didn't manage that
in well over a decade.

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

that doesn't matter in this context.
Unix was (and still is) an OS family with many members,
and for most practical purposes the differences between
them were/are negligible compared to "proprietary" systems.

and that VMS was just as "compatible"
and to push that fact to negate the negative advertising made on
"proprietary systems".

That would have been next to impossible at that time.
"Open Systems" (read: open standards system) was the motd,
and touting the opposite would have been like
advertising "back to stalinism" in the Gorbachev era.

It could have been done, it wasn't done. VMS
flaundered because of that.


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.

IBM had big losses in 1992/1993, but they also still had deep pockets.
DEC had big losses in the same time frame, and compared to
the size of the company they were at least as large as IBM's.
But IBM already had at least some strategy when Gerstner
took over, their RISC/Unix offering was on the market for
about 2 or years (and that was vital at that time,
although people here still seem to deny it).

Had there been a truly competant leader instead
of Palmer, I think Digital might have bought Compaq instead of the other
way around.

Now this is hard to imagine. At that time Compaq was already three times
bigger than DEC. A dwarf swallowing a giant ?

.

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