[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[JF Mezei]

David Froble wrote:

> As for the "reduce Alpha sales" bullshit, I've read it before, and it's just as stupid, or 
> more, now as it was then.  When a vendor starts telling a customer what they're going to 
> get, instead of asking what they want, that vendor will soon have no customers.


In the Apple bible (the book of Jobs), Steve Jobs says something very
important: If you are not willing to cannabalise your own products with
a better/different one, someone else will.

This became very important when phones started to include built-in music
players and cameras. Apple coming out with its onw phone would
cannabalise sales of ipods, but the money would still stay at Apple. Not
doing so meant the money would go to SonyEriccson/Nokia/Motorola and the
then nascent asian players.

Digital's insistence that smaller system not be able to perform the
duties of the bigger systems (so as to not cannabalise sales of the more
profitable bigger machines) meant that customers simply left digital.

The problem with VAX to Alpha transition isn't Alpha, but rather the
fact that Digital not only failed to port all of its software portfolio,
but also failed to provide a built-in software emulator or one time
binary translator.


Consider that Apple has been able to do 2 platform changes very
succesfully (MacOS between 86k and PowerPC, and OS-X between PowerPC and
32 bit 8086 and later 64 bit)  The last transition involved Rosetta
which was able to very smartly emulate PPC on an Intel, including the
conversion between big and litle endian.

Had DEC provided VEST with all alpha systems and perhaps spruced it up a
bit, allowing the vesting of those packages that DEC was not porting
itself (such as message router etc),  DEC would have been able to retain
many more customers through the transition.

The added performance of Alpha did not compensate for the business
practice problems for licencing and recompiling (and for C, updatig from
VAXC to DECC)