[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

[David Froble]

JF Mezei wrote:
> 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.

What's really funny here is that Cerner's Unix platform was AIX.  Under 
what circumstances could HP ever hope to get them to move to UP-UX? 
None that I can imagine.

IBM had to get a big laugh from that.

> 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.

A friend ended up with a job with a group of hospitals.  There was some 
fierce efforts made by some to get the hospitals to implement a weendoze 
environment.  At one meeting Joe pointed out to the executives, "you can 
pick any environment you want to, but the only 2 that do what we need is 
IBM and DEC.  The weendoze weenies lost that argument ....