[Info-vax] Out with Hurd, in with OpenVMS

[JF Mezei]

Michael Kraemer wrote:

> AFAIR it was discussed to split the organisation into more
> independent units, not to sell them.
> Nobody would have bought e.g. the mainframe division anyway.

M&B bankers had already been involved to sell off parts of IBM.
Transactiosn were allegedly ready to proceed when Gerstner started.


> I'd prefer a book from a person less personally involved.
> IBM lost some 10% of their revenue for two or three years.
> So did DEC.

Gerstner's book reveals the true state of IBM when he started the job.
It was much worse than people had been lead to believe.

> But at IBM the changes in the product portfolio had already
> happened: deemphasizing mainframe business, more attention
> to personal computing (PS/2 and OS/2, although these didn't
> succeed in the end),

Gerstner re-instated the mainframe business because this is what was
generating profits. (and still does). The "de emphasis" done by hsi
predecessor had costed a lot of sales and customer disillusionement was
much higher than internal reports had said, that is because the culture
at IBM was to hide any bad news from the top management, so only
satisfied customers had been polled, so IBM was not aware of what was
wrong with the business. Gerstner changed that.

> Five to six years from Palmer's inauguration
> to that Compaq deal, that's not "quick",
> it's quite an eternity during which he tried
> desperately to save the company.


The word "desperatly" is correct. He had no plan. I remember the
constant game of musical chairs with top management. Every 3 months, he
would change folks at the top. He killed the sales force than a couple
years later, tried to rebuild a sales team. He killed decdocument,
wanting to use some 3rd party documentation tool, sold decdocument to
some german firm. Then some time later, someone manageed to convince him
of the stupidity of that move and how costly it would be to convert all
of Digital's existing documentation to that new package that didn't even
run on VMS.

His reorgs were kneee jerk reactions without a real long term plan.




> By the time of the deal Compaq were three times bigger than DEC.
> I would assume that five years earlier Compaq was already
> too big to be bought by DEC.

Digital was the number 2 computer firm behind IBM. Compaq was just a PC
maker nowehere near able to buy something like Digital.

But under Palmer, while Compaq continued to grow, Digital shrunk so much
it became small enough to be purchased.