[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

[JF Mezei]

On 13-12-04 02:13, Michael Kraemer wrote:

> You forget that almost all of the industry, including even IBM and Sun
> had lined up behind the Itanic, whereas Alpha was already on the
> way out.


"lined up" is a bit too strong. They had been coerced into trialing IA64
in exchange for keeping good prices on x86 chips.

Had HP told Intel to give up before/at Merced, nobody would have
complained about IA64 not making it to market.


As soon as Curly started to date LaCarly, HP could have told Intel to
give up on IA64 and that it would instead inhering Alpha.

Compaq had already begun to port NSK to Alpha.

Alpha was up and running and competitivce in performance.  Under Intel,
it could have become industry standard for servers and high end desktops.

And yeah, when the 8086 grew up to 64 bits, Alpha's server market share
would have shrunk, but just like Power still has a market, Alpha could
have had one with the advantage that it would be multi vendor at the
system level.

And it would have been easier for LaCarly to juystify her folly since it
least she would have been acquiring tech that would give HP and edge and
allow HP to quite the money pit albatros that IA64 was. As it was, HP
was simply removing a competitor in the PC market and not getting any
tech that it would leverage.



Don'.t forget that LaCarly didn't have the votes for her merger with
Curly until the very last minute when she got Bankers Trust to agree to
support her in exchange for whatecver LaCarly promised (or did to the
banker :-)



What is truly amazing in that saga is that CEOs look more at protecting
their personnal turf and golden parachutes rather than maximising the
value of investments they make.

IA64 made sense in the 1990s when HP needed something to compete against
Alpha Power and Sparc. But by 2001, this had changed quite a bit,
expecially with HP getting Alpha and it woudl have gained a lot of
leverage by giving it to Intel.


Note that internally at Intel, a lot of people disagreed with IA64.