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

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:
> 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. 

By the time Palmer became boss this *was* fixed.
Alpha hardware was roughly in sync with the competitors,
in contrast to VAXen being overpriced by factors 3 to 6.

> That should have been job #1, instead
> of focusing on changing the Digital logo all over the world.
> 
> 
> 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.

That's not unusual. For example I don't remember IBM ever dropped
the price of obsolete hardware, e.g. to clean out their
stock. It was just discontinued, at (almost) the same price
when it was introduced.
Even next generation often came at (almost) the same price as
the previous one, but was of course more powerful.

> 
> 
>>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.

Nothing wrong here. Changing hardware platform allows to get
rid of old habits.
Again: the problem with Alpha,
on which DEC had bet its future, was that it came way too late
and almost *everything* within this ecosystem
(hardware, support, VMS, Unix, NT) was at V1.0 at best,
at a time when competitors had (for the time) mature
complete solutions to reap the benefits of downsizing
and open systems wave.
To believe that this or that single piece of VMS software
would have changed that is just wishful thinking.
Even VMS as a whole is insignificant here.
What might have helped a bit would have been focusing
solely on Unix, leaving VMS on VAX and NT on x86,
at least for the time being.

But all that mess was decided upon long before Palmer
got the helm.

> 
>>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.

But you couldn't have produced a $1000 machine with the fastest
Alpha in it without making a loss, because this CPU alone
costs $2000 to make.