[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

[JF Mezei]

On 13-12-03 13:07, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:

> No-one said 100,000 SHOPS, but rather 100,000 SYSTEMS.  Suppose a paying 
> customer has 50 systems (seems like a good average to me), then the 
> numbers are compatible.

However, when you factor that large deployments such as Blockbuster
Video stores in USA and Canada which no longer exist, this may have
resulted in the loss of only 1 customer, but thousands of systems.

The loss of Cerner on VMS probably causes the loss of a few hundred
customers. (how many hospitals ran the cerner software on VMS ? hundreds
? thousands ?)

And since this required high up-time/availability, each cerner customer
would likely have had a minimum of 3 VMS nodes.

I know that in the case of SWIFT, Palmer told them that VMS was no
longer strategic to Digital, so they moved off of it. I have to assume
something similar happened with Cerner for them to decide to move off
VMS, with HP claiming that they hoped many customers would move to HP-UX.

So, when the owner of a product tells its customers to stop buying that
product, it should be no surprise to anyone that people stop buying it.