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

[JF Mezei]

Michael Kraemer wrote:

> Under Palmer things got better, pricing was more in sync
> with the RISC competition. 

If you sell at $100 while the competition sells at $10, lowering your
price to $90 does allow you to claim that things got better, but it
still doesn't bring it down to competitive levels.

> Alpha simply came three years too late,

Lowering price of Vax would have bridged the GAP. One problem with
Digital is that it didn't lower prices of existing hardware. It lowered
price when it got new hardware. But competition would have required
constant price decreases. Selling an 150meg RD54 for $6000 in early
1990s when you could get 500 meg drives for $500 just didn't cut it.

> its ecosystem (OSF/1,VMS) needed yet more years to play catchup.

That is in large part due to the slash and burn by Palmer who eradicated
so much of the VMS layered products. And remember that many never got
ported to Alpha either.

> DEC tried twice to enter the PC market with Alpha boxes,

Yeah, the crippled ones that couldn't boot VMS because they didn't want
to produce low end boxes that VMS customers could use.

Sorry, but "try" is not good enough when you look at what they did.
Trying is not good enough. You need to DO IT.

Yes, I know that getting "industry standard" stuff to work on VMS and
Alpha is a double challenge in terms of writing drivers for devices that
expect to be able to execcute 8086 code and whose vendor won't document
their wares.  But I suspect that if Palmer had gone to those vendors and
asked for the right documentation, Digital would have gotten it.  CEO to
CEO works better for that type of cooperation to unlock those doors.

And his big baby, the Hudson fab is a big example. He wanted to reserve
production capacity IN CASE Alpha got popular, so he turned down major
contracts. It was a state of the art facility when it opened. But it
remained underused and lost a lot of money because Palmer never found
the way to make high volume products.

Was his job easy ? No. But he didn't know how to do it, he should have
found someone who could.