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

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article
<9c29b7e9-7a94-45c3-8b63-f245bc310bcd at j20g2000vby.googlegroups.com>,
John Wallace <johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk> writes: 

> 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.

Right.

> 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).

Right.

> 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.

I think the main reason for the demise of DEC was its demise in academia 
first.  When DEC was big in academia, lots of people had VMS experience, 
and this carried over to non-academic jobs.  VMS people were just as 
cheap as unix people to hire.  First, DEC lost academia, then it 
snowballed.

Why did it lose out in academia?  Lack of marketing?  Maybe, but it was 
primarily due to unix types who thought unix was cool and VMS wasn't.  
By comparing new unix kit to old VMS kit, they managed to convince 
management that VMS hardware was too expensive (with DECcampus licenses, 
software costs were not an issue).  Linux might be the reason why unix 
stayed on in academia, but the battle was lost before Linux arrived on 
the scene.