[Info-vax] Did Ken Olsen kill Alpha?

[JF Mezei]

Neil Rieck wrote:

> But after the death of Olsen's mentors, Olsen turned to his VPs for
> advice. Many of these VPs represented sales and claimed to have talked
> to customers demanding VAX 9000. But VAX 9000 flopped when it hit the
> market place. Did customers lie to DEC sales, or had DEC salespeople
> deluded themselves into believing there was customer demand? Not sure
> of the answer but DEC was never able to recover the development costs.


Gerster's book deals with this phenomenon. At IBM, middle management had
been conditioned to only give good news to upper management because
those who gave bad news got fired or had heir careers sidelined.

As a result,  upper management get the pink picture of how everything is
running well even though the ship was sinking.  With no info on what was
wrong, upper management could not make the decisions to fix what was wrong.

I had gotten to a point where customer satisfaction surveyr were only
sent to satisfied customers.

This was one of the first things Gerstner noticed and changed at IBM.


I suspect that Olsen suffered the same problem, especially when DEC
started to hire ex IBM guys in the mid 1980s.  Olsen may have been told
that it was imperative to produce "mainframes" to compete against IBM
and told that producing low cost affordbale machines was not necessary
(this is where DEC was weak).

Remember that the 9000 wasn't about the ECL technology, it was pitched
as a mainframe killer. It is ironic that at the same time DEC wanted to
battle IBM mainframes, IBM came out with its AS400s as "VAX killers".

*I* don't know whether Olsen was highly opiniated or whether he listened
to his troups on where DEC should go.

When you consider what Intel has been able to do with its 8086, one
wonders if DEC engineers at that time knew it would be possible to scale
VAX for another decade if not more. Or was there true consensus within
the engineering community that RISC was the only way to go ?

It is somewhat ironic that one of the things which made it possible for
Intel to scale its 8086 was the "Alpha Inside!" tech they "obtained"
from Digital. That same tech might have allowed the VAX to scale just as
well.

Note that even Intel thought that the 8086 was a dead end and started
the IA64 project in part because of that.

> competing with themselves. IMHO, once DEC made the decision to migrate
> from 32-bit CISC to 64-bit RISC, they should have stopped developing
> VAX. This would have left DEC with more cash available to weather the
> future.

If I recall correctly, NVAX was one of the multiple projects running at
same time as the 9000. It turned out that they were able to match the
performance of the 9000 with the NVAX chip and it got just a couple of
speed bumps in early 1990s.

Also remember that while Alpha systems may have come onto the market in
sept 1992, it was only a "scaled down" VMS that was available on it and
one had to wait untl VMS 6.something before the full feature set (new
queue manager comes to mind) came to Alpha.

So there was a period of time where VAX improvements were still needed
despite Alpha having arrived.

Also, because Palmer started his software slash and burn and a lot of
software was not ported to Alpha, a lot of customers got stuck on VAX.
And they wanted upgrades.

This si where Apple succeeded with its platform changes where DEC
failed. DEC should have made VEST standard on Alpha and make it work
more transparently so that even abandonned software could work on Alpha.

And this is why you still have a lot of places still running VAXes
around the world.


> Speculation: IBM had huge financial problems between the late 1980s
> and early 1990s. I'll bet there were some people at DEC who believed
> that DEC would survive the 1990s while IBM might fail.

Perhaps DEC really thought IBM would falter and with their 9000, they
would be able to get IBM's customer base.  But this again shows how DEC
in the late 1980s was focused on IBM and not the real competition.