[Info-vax] Should Oracle buy OpenVMS?

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:

> 
> Curly had already tried to kill VMS the year before, but was convinced
> by Marcello to not only suspend those plans (because Compaq desperatly
> needed the revenus generated by VMS) but was also given a modest
> marketing budget (which lead to the few months of "VMS renaissance" with
> early 10% growth in sales. 

I find this hypothetical correlation between marketing budget
and increased VMS sales hard to believe.
The "typical" (as I'm told here all day long) VMS customer would
think long term rather than being influenced by a short term
ad campaign.
Or can you really imagine a stock exchange's CIO saying
"hey, I've seen some cool VMS ads last night,
let's buy a couple of those boxes"
?

> 
> One can also argue that Palmer had set in motion a roadmap to kill Alpha
> when he signed that deal with Intel where in exchange for removing the
> Hudson FAB burden from Digital, Intel would get the IP rights to Alpha,
> and Digital would port Digital Unix to IA64. (Which shows that Palmer
> didn't have long term plans for VMS).
> 
> My guess is that the Carly/Curly marriage forced Compaq to precipitate
> the murder of Alpha.  
> 
> One possibility, is that Intel had given Palmer an open invitation to
> kill Alpha when the deal between the two was signed. Curly could have
> used that already negotiated plan when he got on his knees to beg Carly
> to buy Compaq.

I think it is very probable that Alpha's fate was already
sealed when Palmer sold it to intel in 1997.
DEC got rid of the fab in turn for the promise to kill alpha
within a few years, in favour of Itanic.
Otherwise it doesn't make sense:
why would intel have agreed to manufacture a chip competing
with its own high-end product ?
Certainly they didn't need the money,
and I don't believe those patent issues were a big threat
for intel.

Compaq inherited the DEC/intel deal, and maybe the imminent
takeover by HP just accelerated Alpha's demise.