[Info-vax] Steve Jobes [was: Apple says ...]

[John Wallace]

On Oct 9, 12:39 am, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilber... at comcast.net>
wrote:
> On 10/8/2011 6:05 PM, VAXman- @SendSpamHere.ORG wrote:
>
>
>
> > In article<SqOdncY9euaqXQ3TnZ2dnUVZ_v-dn... at giganews.com>, "Richard B. Gilbert"<rgilber... at comcast.net>  writes:
> >> On 10/8/2011 3:39 AM, George Cornelius wrote:
> >>> In article<4e8e0bd4$0$2477$e4fe5... at news2.news.xs4all.nl>, MG<marcog... at SPAMxs4all.nl>   writes:
> >>>> Unlike Ken Olsen, Steve Jobs is often deified and gets media coverage
> >>>> all the time; or else his registered trademarks and logos.  Only some
> >>>> online publications, along with a few institutions (like one American
> >>>> university) made mention of Olsen's death, in terms recognition in
> >>>> the mass-media and overall mention in general.  Even DEC 'inheritor'
> >>>> HP barely made mention of Ken Olsen's passing away.  So, yes, there
> >>>> is definitely a difference alright.
>
> >>> Well, Jobs was a national figure.  Olson, even in Digital's heyday,
> >>> was known to few.  Both attempted to market premium products at
> >>> premium prices.  But Olson is well known for disdaining marketing,
> >>> and disdaining the consumer market as well.
>
> >> And he drove DEC right into the ground!  R.I.P. DEC
>
> > I think Palmer had more of a hand in that!
>
> I think there's plenty of blame to spread around.  The fact remains that
> DEC was selling its merchandise at a premium while the competition was
> selling for less, a *lot* less!  At more or less the same time the X86
> platform and MS DOS was starting to conquer the world.  The X86 platform
> became a commodity and sold at commodity prices.  As I recall, the DEC
> Rainbow (X86) PC sold for something like $5,000 list price.
>
> Other vendors could undercut this price and did so!  DEC didn't even TRY
> to compete on price, at least not until it was far too late.
>
> R.I.P. DEC

It's somewhat more complicated than that, and more complicated than I
can realistically describe here, but here's a bit of detail.

For much of the lifetime of Alpha, DEC were (largely) not competing
against PCs, they were competing (as they thought) against the UNIX
vendors, and the vendors of proprietary systems. At that time, x86
Unix was neither credible nor "free".

The first NT/Alpha box that looked like a PC was (so I'm told) a
skunkworks project, with little corporate support, which had
unfortunate consequences such as the ridiculously large number of
chips on the motherboard. But it proved the principle that you could
put NT (or VMS, or UNIX) in a box that looked roughly like a PC, and
it would work, and sometimes if customers actually got to use it, it
would sell.

By the time the PCI Alphas came out, based largely on commodity
technology, the system prices were entirely competitive with other
vendors boxes. Sun and IBM sites where I took an Alpha on loan
typically said "why has no one showed us these before". This applied
in particular to the Solaris users who saw Tru64. The sites I visited
were typically technical sites who didn't need much more than an OS, a
compiler, and probably a database, so the alleged lack of apps was a
non-issue to them.

There was an issue when the same hardware could run either NT or Tru64
or VMS. To compete with PCs, the NT flavour had to be sensibly priced,
and was. To recover the VMS/Tru64 development costs the OS had to have
a price premium whilst staying competitive agains UNIX boxes, and it
was (at least in the UK).

What in my experience was a disaster for the company was the general
unwillingness of country level management to move out of the comfort
zone of the installed base, or for the level above that to attempt to
compete head on with Intel. Given Intel's history, it should be
obvious why there was a reluctance to compete head on, even if the
relevant management had had the capability and willingness.

In parallel with that, even when PCI-based Alpha systems were
reasonably affordable for both PC and non-PC sectors, country level
management were still focusing on "selling up" to the existing
customer base (sell some more storage, sell some services, that kind
of thing) to maintain revenue and profit, rather than expanding the
customer base (e.g. by going aggressively in to appropriate Sun and
IBM customers, and selected NT customers where Alpha performance was a
deal maker).

And alongside all that there were parts of the DEC organisation that
were behaving as though they were still in a parallel universe, or in
the world of twenty years ago. Parts of CustomSystems, for example,
were doing a grand job, but there were others whose role is best left
undescribed.

This is all based on UK/European experience, it may have been
different elsewhere.

That being said, GQ Bob was indeed a disaster regardless of where you
were.