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

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:
> 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.
> 

Now this tells a somewhat different story.
Selling parts of a company in times of trouble
is usual practice, although so far uncommon at IBM.
Would be interesting to hear which parts.

> 
>>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.
> 

That may be, mainly because people always thought of IBM
being invincible. But they weren't, of course.
But I doubt they were in worse shape than DEC.

>>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 

it was the other way round.
Customers ran away from mainframes (towards open systems) like crazy
and this is what generated losses, not profits.
However, IBM reacted intelligently by offering the RS/6000 lineup
which at least partially kept "blue" customers.
That happened years before Gerstner.
Gerstner's smart move was not to drop mainframes entirely,
but to reposition them and to cut their TCO,
keeping them attractive for a couple of key customers.

> 
>>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. 

maybe the original sales team wasn't good?

> 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.

Just how many people inside DEC actually *used* VMS rather than PCs
for such tasks?

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

DEC was in such a bad shape that
I wonder whether there was time left to invent a 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.

You should look at the absolute numbers, not the rank order.
Around 1990+x IBM was a $50+x billion company, DEC was 10+x,
and the others were close to, if not almost as large as DEC.
So it wasn't like DEC being close to IBM, it was IBM far ahead
and the rest follows.

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

Compaq were already $6Bn in 1992 (i.e. already too big to be bought
by ailing DEC). But they had the right products
which allowed them to grow to $20B in 1996,
http://www.answers.com/topic/compaq-computer-corporation

DEC were at $14Bn (with a huge loss of $3Bn, approx 20% of their revenue),
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/DIGITAL+EQUIPMENT+CORPORATION+REPORTS+THIRD+QUARTER+OPERATING+RESULTS-a012037282
and still were at $13Bn by the time of the Compaq deal,
http://news.cnet.com/Compaq-to-buy-Digital-for-9.6-billion/2100-1001_3-207442.html