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

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:
> 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.

I don't think the price gap between Alpha hardware
and contemporary RISC hardware (POWER,PA,Sparc,Mips)
was a factor of ten. With the advent of Alpha,
which happened about the same time Palmer became
boss, DEC started to charge more reasonable prices.

> 
>>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.

But that was still Olsen/VAX era, not Palmer/Alpha,
so you cannot hold Palmer responsible for that.
Sure DEC branded disks would cost more, maybe even for
some good reason, but that's not unusual, the competition
did the same.
And btw, even in 1990 nobody would have bought a 150Meg disk
anymore, the standard was 660 or even 990.

> 
>>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.

What slash and burn?
Alpha machines appeared about the same time as Palmer became CEO.
Whatever "slash and burn" had occured before,
it wasn't Palmer's responsibility.
However, it would have been important to offer the first Alpha's
together with a mature Unix ecosystem to benefit
from the downsizing wave, like the competition
(IBM, HP, Sun) did. But OSF/1 was at 1.0,
not really ready for prime time.
That was the original sin.

> 
>>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.

Nobody expected them to run VMS.
They ran NT/Alpha, hoping enough M$ software
would be ported in order to reach high volumes.

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

They did, and failed, due to the nature of the product.
You can't make a $1000 PC with a $2000 CPU.
Of course one can cripple the CPU to lower the price,
but then, where's the advantage over commodity stuff?

> 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. 

Is there any independent reference to confirm this,
or is this just another urban legend?

> 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.

Such a person probably didn't exist.
With Olsen's heritage, DEC was more or less doomed.