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

[JF Mezei]

Michael Kraemer wrote:

> Being a customer back then, I doubt that IBM ever was in real danger.

Read the book "Who says elephanst can't dance" by Lou Gerstner

http://www.amazon.ca/Who-Says-Elephants-Cant-Dance/dp/0060523808/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318178680&sr=1-5

IBM had begun the process of breaking up and drawing bankrupcy paper. It
was that close.

> world seemed to be near. However, they had changed their
> strategy long before that, i.e. deemphasizing the role
> of the mainframe (and hardware altogether) as the main source
> of income (the RS/6000 appeared already in 1990),

They had not changed corporate philosophy. And since the mainframe was
their core business (like VMS was to DIgital), that policy of
deemphasising it is what killed IBM. Gerstner changed that to try to
make mainframes competitive.

Palmer just continued to produce ads asking VMS customers to ditch
DIgital and go with Unix.


> DEC on the other hand was hit by their downturn
> about the same time, but the timing was much worse
> for them. They had to adopt open systems and introduce
> the Alpha just about the same time they suffered from
> heavy losses 


Alpha was THE opportunity for DEC to come back had Alphas been priced
agressively right from the start.

Consider how Palmer sold off Dec Document and announced that all DEC's
documentation would be using some 3rd party software before looking into
how muc it would really cost to convert all of the documentation library.

This was the perfect example of stupid moves that would be repeated many
many times.

DEC had no direction, no vision under Palmer. You can't execute a
directioN/vision when your execs play musical chairs game every quarter
and they spend time learning about their new job instead of doing stuff.


There was not that much that was wrong under Olsen. Lack of marketing.
This is easly fixed. And high prices. This gets fixed in 2 stages: cut
your margins and stop pretending your products are so much better they
command 10 times the price of competitors ( DEC-C compiler vs Microsoft's).

Seclondly, and this Palmer understood, was the move to commodity
cmponents. But this may have happened too little too late, by that time,
DEC was already in "threw in the towel, negotiating with Compaq for
takeover" mode.