[Info-vax] RealWorldTech on Poulson

[John Wallace]

On Jul 4, 10:01 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> John Wallace wrote:
> > By the time the DIGITAL Personal Workstation(433, 500 and 600MHz,
> > fwiw) came out, the basic prices were reasonably competitive compared
> > with similarly configured UNIX workstations from other vendors (sorry,
> > no references right now).
>
> The problem is that by the time this came out, Digital shouldn't have
> been competiting against dying workstations, it should have competed
> against the PC.

There is a culture in many businesses of "not leaving money on the
table", ie pricing your product as high as the market will stand while
still selling enough to keep the company afloat. The classic IT
example would still be Apple.

National Instruments (the Labview etc people) also often strike me as
a company positioned similarly to DEC in its glory days; I've never
used their stuff in anger (yet) but they give the impression of
offering a premium service for a premium price, which is fair enough
if they deliver.

DEC Germany did try to sell Alpha PCs (Jensens, iirc, aka DECpc AXP
150) through Vobis. There were many reasons it didn't work out. The
Jensen wasn't really a mass market product (EISA? 'orrible low-
integration motherboard design? did it even need ECC RAM, I forget).
More importantly, for Jensen and beyond, the promised NT/Alpha support
from Microsoft never really arrived. By the time the PC-centric Alpha
designs arrived, with PC-style IO and proper chipsets, it was too
late, x86 was catching up and (for NT at least) didn't have the issues
Alpha had with application compatibility and driver availability.

It'll be interesting to watch how well ARM do with Windows 8 in
comparison. This time, it seems to be Microsoft that wants it to
happen, which may work out better than when Palmer thought he'd got
Gates on side.