[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

[Bill Gunshannon]

In article <l7lkvj$s5e$1 at dont-email.me>,
	David Froble <davef at tsoft-inc.com> writes:
> 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 ....

-- 
Bill Gunshannon          |  de-moc-ra-cy (di mok' ra see) n.  Three wolves
billg999 at cs.scranton.edu |  and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.
University of Scranton   |
Scranton, Pennsylvania   |         #include <std.disclaimer.h>