[Info-vax] OT: About Digital and divisions

[Richard B. Gilbert]

On 11/30/2011 6:05 PM, seasoned_geek wrote:
> On Nov 19, 10:51 am, JF Mezei<jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca>  wrote:
>> Remember how in the 1980s, Digital had all the ingredients and brought
>> it as a single solution from hardware to applications and support ? All
>> that fell apart when Palmer took over and divided Digital and sold off
>> so many applications.
>>
>
> Actually it fell apart when Ken Olsen allowed MBA's to join the
> company.
>
> It went off the rails when DEC originally created the Micro-PDP BEFORE
> IBM shipped their PC and refused to sell it because the sub $8K price
> tag would cannibalize existing PDP-11 sales.
>
> It imploded when he allowed the eat-your-own-young competition to
> continue with the VAX 9000 while the Alpha was close to completion.  I
> had one client who spent around a million dollars installing a 9000
> and migrating licenses, etc. only to have it be worth less than
> $250,000 six months later when the Alpha started shipping.
>
> It became a pile of smoldering ash DEC launched the Rainbow and some
> MBA decided to charge $5 for a pre-formatted 5 1/4 floppy while
> withholding a FORMAT utility...

Not terribly bright and certainly not terribly effective.  Somebody 
wrote and distributed a program to format blank floppies with a DEC Format!

There went the $5.00 US floppy disk!  Bye bye DEC's floppy business!
There was something seriously wrong with DEC's notions about pricing
commodities!

<snip>

It was this sort thing that killed DEC.  I have never really understood
why DEC couldn't or wouldn't compete in a free market.  As far as I can 
see they were living in some sort of dream world were people would buy 
anything branded DEC even if someone even if someone else was selling an 
equivalent product for ten or fifteen percent of what DEC was asking!

R.I.P. Digital Equipment Corporation!