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

[JF Mezei]

Michael Kraemer wrote:

> But that was still Olsen/VAX era, not Palmer/Alpha,
> so you cannot hold Palmer responsible for that.

Palmer is responsible for not fixing the price/competitiveness
sufficiently and quickly enough. That should have been job #1, instead
of focusing on changing the Digital logo all over the world.


> And btw, even in 1990 nobody would have bought a 150Meg disk
> anymore, the standard was 660 or even 990.

Which is why RD54 prices should have dropped in price to match current
prices. I used RD54 as example, but this applied to all of DEC's
hardware. The price set at launch would remain even years later when the
product's value had gone way down.


> What slash and burn?
> Alpha machines appeared about the same time as Palmer became CEO.
> Whatever "slash and burn" had occured before,

You may not remember, but it was Palmer that instituted the slash and
burn of Digital's software portfolio. Some sold off to others, many
abandonned. Many never made it to Alpha because they were abandonned
right at the start of Palmer's tenure.

This is significant because if you wanted to rebuild VMS as a
competitive system, you needed all the software you could muster to
relaunch it. Instead, Palmer downsized the software portfolio
significantly so when Alpha VMS came out, there was a lot less software
available. Remember that the 3rd party abandonment of VMS had already
begun, so keeping at lest the DEC software alive would have helped.

Palmer acted as if all problems had been solved on day 1 of his tenure
and then decided that VMS was so succesful and so much in demand because
of Alpha that 3rd parties would step in withi days to release software
for VMS and it was so popular that Digital didn't need its own sales
force anymore.



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

But volume on that model would have been higher if they had provided VMS
support. It is silly to have one model crippled to run NT, and another
more expensive model that runs both. There should have been 1 low cost
model for both.

> 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?

Crippling a machine is just not done in a competitive environment. If
you can produce a machine for $1000 with X CPU in it, you will market
that machine with the fastest speed that CPU can do. If your slow it
down because you want to differentiate it from your more expensive but
otherwise identical box, then your competition will eat you alive. And
that is what happened to Digital.

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

False. Olsen's heritage had great value. Yes, direction and corporate
culture needed to be updated/tweaked, but Digital, at its core, had
excellent engineering and innovation capability and if steered in the
right direction, would have been able to produce competitive hardware
just as anybody else.

There was nothing magic about Compaq. In fact, When Digital set out to
build PCs in Kanata Ontario, that facility ended up being more efficient
than Compaq's manufacturing. Unfortunatly, this was realised at a time
when DEC was negotiating with Compaq and Compaq was not interested. It
was one of the first things to be shut down after the merger was signed.

So DEC was perfectly capable of making thing very efficiently and
competitive. But it was not able to market/price then competitively.