[Info-vax] Sounds an awful lot like DEC, and not like HP

[JF Mezei]

>> http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222500081&cid=nl_IW_btl_2010-01-29_h

When Pfeiffer announcer that Compaq would buy Digital, much of the same
arguments were made. Pfeiffer wanted to leverage the Digital assets, and
even spoke of pushing Alpha into mainstream. There was instant
advertising that mention VMS (not the dreaded OpenVMS).

But once shareholders got antsy about no short term return on that huge
investment, Pfeiffer was ousted. Cpmpaq ran without a leader for a
while, and they finally gave on on finding a true leader and gave the
CEO job to the accountant.  His first task was to call bankers to find a
buyer.

There is a big difference with Oracle. Ellison is a strong leader and he
has good control of the company so he has time to implement his vision
before shareholders get antsy. So the odds of him succeeding are higher.

However, that article mentions a focus on high end systems. From a VMS
point of view, we all know that restricting a platform to high end
systems means an ever dwindling customer base because the high end is
being eroded by 8086s running some form of Unix.


While it may be correct to state that Oracle/Sun can't compete against
the commodity systems from Dell/HP, what happens when he commodity
systems from Dell/HP start to compete against Sun/Oracle ?

BTW, in the same series of articles, there is one about HP.

http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219400776

While it is true that HP may have consolidated and slahed internal IT
costs, this is not a common possibility in industry.  HP inherited its
own systems, those of Compaq, Tandem and Digital. Obviously,
consolidation was possible and relatively easy to justify since there
would have been so much duplication.

But an existing company that is not born of mergers and acquisitions
wouldn't have all that overhead and dupolication of systems, so such
rationalisation wouldn't happen to that level.