[Info-vax] BOINC for VMS

[John Wallace]

On Mar 15, 3:42 pm, Paul Sture <p... at sture.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:51:16 -0700, Johnny Billquist wrote:
> > DEC was constantly at war with itself. There are/were several arcade
> > games which used the PDP-11 as the CPU. They could definitely have
> > competed way more there, except they often refused to sell, kicked the
> > price up to make it unviable, or cut off supplies, afraid that selling
> > CPUs would hurt their sales of larger systems, and big money on that
> > end.
>
> > DEC was was too scared of losing its existing business to be able to
> > get into new areas from the mid 70s and onwards.
>
> DEC also mucked around in its policy of how they treated OEMs, at least
> in the UK.  Traditionally, DEC's UK salesmen were not on commission and
> were basically order takers rather than salesmen, visiting large
> corporations and saying "How many systems do you want next year?".  They
> refused to talk to us because we had  a smaller turnover than 100
> million, pointing us to OEMs instead.
>
> A few years later, DEC UK wanted that OEM business themselves, and there
> were accusations that they played dirty to get it.
>
> And then a few years after that, we were told to go through OEMs again.
>
> It really was unsettling from a customer's point of view.
>
> Incidentally, those OEMs were the ones who first put PDPs to commercial
> use doing "boring stuff" like accounting packages, and opened up a brand
> new market.
>
> --
> Paul Sture

"What's the channel strategy this week, Geoff?"

>From my point of view the one that worked best for customers like me
(and then the ones I supported from inside DEC) was when DECdirect UK
provided sales info and took orders for smaller customers (and small
orders from the rest), mid range were handled by resellers, and high
end were managed by DEC and fulfilled via partners. There were
*informative catalogues*, reproduced in various European variants,
with content on popular product and significant new introductions.
Sometimes the catalogues even came with *prices*. They reportedly paid
for themselves within days of each edition hitting the streets.

There were DECdirect UK people on the end of the phone on 0800 393200
(that number burned into memory, from twenty years ago) to provide
product info, take orders, etc.

The factory in Scotland had a five day turnround between customer
order in Reading to made-to-order system leaving the factory. Still
hard to beat today.

Presumably that commercial arrangement wasn't popular with the
majority of the middlemen (aka "the channel") though, as it was
brought to an untimely end. The catalogues and other outgoing
promotion work largely stopped. The people were dispersed. And so on.
Which was a shame. It was said that "the channel" would take over the
DECdirect roles (outgoing promotions, fast response, order
fulfillment, etc), but if they did it wasn't always obvious
(exceptions apply).

Water under the bridge, as was said earlier.