[Info-vax] OT: Elephants Can't Dance

[Neil Rieck]

On Feb 25, 7:01 am, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> A friend suggested I read "Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?" (inside
> IBM's historic turnaround) by Louis Gerstner. I am 25% of the way
> through and have only one comment so far:
>
> "why is it that some companies are able to find a person able to turn
> around a supposedly dead company, while other companies continue the
> toboggan ride into the oblivion?
>
> His main actions so far?
> 1) "since a company's employees know what is wrong then why employ so
> many external consultants? So he purged them"
> 2) convince customers that computer trade magazines were wrong about
> their claims that PCs will replace all mainframes, and that some
> enterprise applications (banks, airlines, utilities, etc.) will always
> need mainframes. (he never makes a distinction between main and mini)
> 3) consolidate their own computer centers from > 200 to 16.
>
> Neil Rieck
> Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
> Ontario, Canada.http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/OpenVMS.html

>From page 162 titled: "With OS/2 - the fallacy that the best
technology always wins"
quotes:
1) "as with any product, marketing and merchandising mattered more".
2) "In the mid 1980's, the Windows marketing and PR machine alone had
more people than the total number of people working on OS/2"

>From page 221 titled "we need to grow so let's got acquire
somebody" (not)
quote:
1) the investment banker proposal that stands out most was that IBM
acquire Compaq Computer. The summary of the transaction that was
included in the front of the ever-present blue booked showed IBM's
stock price going up forever after completing the transaction.
Surprised at how this tree would grow to heaven forever, I rummaged
through the appendix and found out that IBM's profits for the next
five years ($50 billion after taxes) would have been wiped out by this
transaction.

2) back in the real world there have been numerous empirical studies
concluded over the past twenty years showing that the likelihood of an
acquisition's proving to be a failure far outweighs the chances of
success.

>From page 222

1) "we didn't need to buy Informix to get into the database business
OR to shore up a weak position (re Oracle). However, we did acquire a
set of customers more quickly and more efficiently than we could have
following a go-it alone strategy"

=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=x=

My comments:

1) Most people in this news group would agree with me that OpenVMS is
the superior OS. However, like OS/2, its various owners have been
doing a poor job of marketing it.

2) If OpenVMS survived two acquisitions (DEC to Compaq to HP) and it
is still alive, then it must be a really good product. However, if
acquisitions are usually a failure, then the superior product will
eventually be a victim of collateral damage.

3) Why is OpenVMS poorly marketed? Even though companies are purchased
by upper management, entrenched employees below them may still see the
acquired company and technology as "the competition". (apparently this
happened all the time at IBM before it recovered). Don't believe me?
Try talking to any HP employee about products in "the Compaq
division".

As others have pointed out elsewhere, maybe OpenVMS should be put into
the public domain under the GPL (general public license). On the flip
side, OpenVMS should be sold to a company which currently has no OS so
there is no sibling rivalry.

1) Intel (they still use VMS in their fabs)
2) Oracle (VMS still goes hand-in-hand with RDB)
3) IBM (their field services people maintain VMS
4) SUN (they don't seem to be willing to pull-the-plug on any project)

Neil Rieck
Kitchener/Waterloo/Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/OpenVMS.html