Re: Question for the Group

On Jun 18, 6:40 am, Michael Kraemer <M.Krae...@xxxxxx> wrote:
AEF schrieb:



Because VMS systems have higher margins.

Overall HP margin is 8%.
BCS' margin is not much larger, about 8.8%.
So either VMS does not contribute significantly
to BCS' results or its margins are not that much larger
than the average.

I thought VMS was a higher-margin product than that. Maybe not. I
think it certainly used to be and people were willing to pay more for
quality.

Suppose that HP replaced all
its customers' Windows systems with VMS systems. This would cause a
big increase in profits, no?

Maybe, theoretically. But VMS systems can't do what Windows system
can do on the desktop.

I meant other than desktop.

This would have the added advantage of
not having to deal with MS or Linux.

With Linux they wouldn't have the burden to develop
an own OS.

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?

I simply don't believe in the omnipotence of "marketing",
not if it would go against the trend.

Then how did Windows get to be so big?

I remotely remember IBMs OS/2 campaign against Windows 3.1
in the early 1990s. Their product was good, the advertisement
cool, they got a few retailers on board, but the trade press
and the majority of users (and maybe even part of IBM) were
against it, and by the time Windoze 95 came along,
all was history.

One failure doesn't prove anything. If Windows didn't succeed through
marketing, then how did it succeed? Certainly not through techincal
excellence!


What do you want to advertise ?
Any cool groundbreaking apps since 1998 ?
The biggest news would be the completion of yet another port,
this time to a mediocre CPU.

WTC success stories. Just general promotion to at least keep things
from sliding further. There's some good promotional material on HP's
Web site. Make a few ads from it. Nothing expensive. What would it
hurt?


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!

I wouldn't be surprised if it happened.
HP is no longer the high tech IT company it used to be.



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!!!

Maybe because it's so broken that fixing isn't worthwhile ?
Even if it has been deliberately damaged,
accusations won't change the end results.

Well, you didn't say that before.


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.)

Just look at the numbers publicly available at openvms.org.
I was surprised myself how low a profile serious computing has
in today's HP.
BCS is indeed so tiny they could sell it with little result
on their bottom line. At least that's what the numbers tell me.
And this interpretation includes HP-UX as much as VMS.



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? :-)

No it isn't. I mean I know well that discussing here about the merits
of VMS vs say, *X, is about as fruitless as discussing with Boob
whether god exists or not.
But the majority of customers do not have that much use
for the few features VMS might still have advantages.
Again, what do you want to advertise ?
Security ? OK, the average guy would think: yet
another server OS which claims to be better than the rest.
Yawn.

Others advertise security. Why not VMS? Why not back it up with
something? What would it hurt?

Uptime ? With today's *X boxes you can get easily uptimes
measured in years. And why buy into VMS' arcane clustering
when a simple mainstream HA solution does the job as well ?
Few businesses need 24x365 uptime.

But they need security and quality. I'm not convinced VMS's clustering
is so bad.


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.

If this company has decided to leave VMS for a variety of reasons
simple marketing wouldn't win them back.

But it might keep others from jumping ship.


And it would
help sell more Itanium systems!

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

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.

well, I never worked with AS/400,
but did so with S/390 about a decade ago.
What I meant is that IBM seems to try to keep them alive,
but they do not try to fight an uphill battle to restore
them to their original glory. I think they know very well that
they will dwindle away over time.

I might agree with you that HP (and DEC before) weren't
the smartest when they were cannibalizing their VMS business
in favor of their Unix offerings. I never heard an IBM rep
say: through away your AS/400s and by RS/6000s instead.

AEF

.

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