[Info-vax] Maybe a bit OT, maybe not.. in any case an interesting article

[David Froble]

Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> Technologies come and technologies go all
> the time.

This says more than one might first think about.

Early computers had some uses, and were used accordingly.  They really were way too big, 
heavy, non-portable, and expensive for many uses.

Then along came the PC.  Did the original uses for computers go away?  No, for the most 
part they did not.  However, the lesser (Ok, this is highly objective, but let's not get 
into that) uses that many PCs were used for, from a quantity perspective, greatly 
overshadowed the usage of earlier computers.  So much that the overall market was driven 
by the PCs.  Total dollar sales greatly favored the PCs.

Then along comes notebooks.  Turns out those PC users, for the most part, didn't really 
want that clunky desktop system.  But this was more some minituration than a new type of 
computer.  Regardless, volume sales migrated to the notebooks.

Lately we are inundated with tablet computers and smart phones.  Turns out most of the 
users didn't even want the notebooks.

The problem is, some of the uses of the early computers still exist.  But the systems are 
a very small part of the total market.  The same seems to be happening to the PCs. 
Regardless of the total market, the small parts are still essential to some users, 
however, they have less and less attention from the vendors.

What makes it worse is, customers want a mainframe for the price of an Ipod, and feel 
that's what they should get.  Well, I want a lot of things too, but get very few of them.

So if you have some of the "traditional" needs for a computer system, you're a very small 
market, and the vendors tell you to put up with windoz and linux and go away and stop 
bothering them, they want to sell more tablet computers.

 From what I can see, the only company still listening to the users of large systems is 
IBM.  HP doesn't seem to really care.  Not sure who else is left.

Did everybody that used VMS back in the "day" really need everything VMS did for them? 
No, and some were always going to move to smaller and cheaper systems.  Word processing 
and spreadsheets and such were never a good fit for VMS.  But there were many good fits 
for VMS.  Could VMS have retained more market share than they did?  I for one think they 
could have, if they would have changed with the times and market.  DEC couldn't and didn't 
and is no longer with us.  Compaq was never an option.  HP ended up with VMS, but not 
because they wanted it.