[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[Michael Kraemer]

Bob Koehler schrieb:
> In article <hdaikk$h0f$03$1 at news.t-online.com>, Michael Kraemer <M.Kraemer at gsi.de> writes:
> 
>    It was always clear to me that going to MIPS was a stopgap strategy
>    to keep DEC from loosing the business to RISC/UNIX when VAXen
>    fell off the bottom of the price/performance curve.
> 
>    DEC was a software company that thought it was still a hardware
>    company but clearly knew that VMS was a major source of revenue
>    and the center of its growing software portfolio,and would not 
>    readily port to MIPS.

Of course they were a hardware company,
and customers bought mainly due to hardware,
the OS being a nice add-on.
Otherwise people wouldn't have left VAX for better price/performance.

>    Coming out with Alpha after loosing the business to RISC/UNIX did
>    not turn out to be a workable business strategy.

Moving customers to Mips/Ultrix first and expecting them to
do another migration to alpha only three years later
didn't pan out, of course.