Re: Question for the Group

On Jun 13, 4:46 am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae...@xxxxxx> wrote:
AEF schrieb:
[...]
Again you're justifying letting the patient die by saying, "Look, the
patient is dying. Let's go home." It's the POTENTIAL profits. High-
margin profits.

History has proved that companies are willing to spend more for VMS if
it weren't allowed to languish as it is. Would it kill HP to try?
Would the shareholders revolt if profits from VMS increased? Doesn't
it make sense to market your high-margin products?

Well, I'm not in HPs shoes and I have no business
in defending their actions, I just find their strategy comprehensible.
Why should they put extra effort on such a tiny fraction of their business ?

Because VMS systems have higher margins. Suppose that HP replaced all
its customers' Windows systems with VMS systems. This would cause a
big increase in profits, no? This would have the added advantage of
not having to deal with MS or Linux. And HP would have a hold on the
customers. And the customers would greatly benefit from a very
superior operating system. What horrors am I missing in this scenario?

And how much extra effort would it really take? Just take a reasonable
fraction of VMS's profits to do some marketing and see what happens.
Would it kill anyone to do so?

Even if VMS revenue was several times larger at the time of
the Compaq takeover, it still was dwarfed by HPs ink ocean.

So were its calculator revenues. Should they let their calculator
business whither away?

So why don't they just drop everything else and re-brand themselves as
INKS R US? They could rewrite their motto: The hell with invent. Ink
it up!

As far as the potential goes: I think (as does probably HP)
you vastly overestimate that, the hey-days of VMS are long gone.

Again you repeat the self-defeating logic: "Why fix something that's
broken?" Well, you don't fix something that's not broken!!!

So if VMS is so lame, why doesn't HP sell it? In fact, why don't they
sell the entire BCS division if it's such tiny a portion of HP's
revenues or profits? (I don't really know how big BCS is in HP, so
maybe ignore this last statement. Correction welcome.)

The few companies who still believe VMS is indispensable for their
IT will buy it anyway, without marketing.

That's EXACTLY why VMS needs marketing: To be sold to people who may
not find it "indispensable", but to whom VMS would still be a better
choice. ... Hey, VMS is always the better choice, no? :-)

Yet again you return with your self-defeating "Why fix something
that's broken?" logic.

Back in 2000 I interviewed at Prudential. They said they were looking
for a VMS sys admin but that their VMS systems were going to be
decommissioned in a year or two as they switch to some Unix solution.
They give one reason as Oracle insisting they run on one particular
version of VMS. I think there were other reasons. Anyway, if DEC/
Compaq/HP hadn't killed the Alpha and had actively promoted VMS they'd
still probably be using it. By resuming promotion and increasing
support, HP can win new VMS customers like Prudential. And it would
help sell more Itanium systems!

Its (almost) just like IBM treat their "legacy" iSeries/zSeries business.

I'm not familiar with that. But I did work with the IBM AS/400 and its
OS/400 operating system back in 1997. Switching among other operating
systems is sort of like switching car makes and models. The controls
are a little different, and the labeling may be different, but it's
sort of the same thing and it's not too hard to get going at least at
a beginner's level. But switching to the OS400 (OS/400?) operating
system was more like being plopped into a parallel universe with
different laws of physics where nothing works as it did before and
there is nothing familiar to get your bearings from.

On the bright side, the screen was very tightly controlled and very
neat. Function keys were always defined on the screen as you moved
among different screens and functions. No burst of anything randomly
in the middle of the screen. No lost messages, IIRC. But it was really
hard to notice the really tiny new-mail indicator.

IBM seems to put a lot more into their operations control systems than
other companies. This also reflects my experience using IBM computers
at the New York Blood Center in 1994.

AEF

.

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