[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[Michael Kraemer]

JF Mezei schrieb:
> 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.

But DEC did just that: one of their few wise decisions
was to start offering their RISC/Unix in 1989/90,
just in time to keep a significant chunk of technical
computing going with DEC. Otherwise those customers
would have been lost to Sun, SGI, HP, IBM etc.
Too bad they let it die on the vine,
in favour of that unproven Alpha thing.

> 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.

I think customers were smarter.
Of course DEC wanted them to spend $$$$$$ on VAX 6000 or 9000,
but (un)fortunately there were also the VS 4000's, which could
do almost the same job for $$$$$