[Info-vax] The dangers of being too emotionally involved, was: Re: How about RdB for x86 VMS?

[JF Mezei]

On 14-09-03 23:56, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> It's questionable whether most folks need these official statements 
> with any urgency, too. 

"urgency" is perhaps exagerated, but consider that last year HP
announced it was killing VMS for real forcing the remaining customer
base to make decisions on their future platforms.

There needs to be enough "umph!" in VSI PR to convince all remaining VMS
customers to kill porting plans or at least put them on hold. And "put
them on hold" means waiting X amount of time for enough hard info to
come out to convince those customers to kill the porting plans to Linux etc.


Porting VMS to x86 won't do much good if none of the 3rd party
middleware and apps become available on it. So those customers will be
looking to see how much of their software will be available on x86.
hence the need to have software developpers/vendor quickly signal they
will re-invest in VMS.

Lets not forget that a lot of VMS software is abandonware with vendors
having stopped working on VMS long ago. That software may have made it
to IA64 but if it was abandonned after that, it may not make it to x86.
Lots more software on Alpha became abandonware before it was ported to IA64.


So while VSI is young/new and we all understand it takes time to ramp up
and deliver, the customers who were in the process of deciding the next
platform need information ASAP to convince them to stick with VMS
instead of continuing with porting projects.

Had the VSI announcement been done *instead* of HP announcing the end of
VMS, things would be very different because customers would not have
been forced to begin porting strategies/plans and would have seen a much
smoother continuation of VMS,

But as it stands, HP poisoned the well with its annoucement, so it will
take much more PR to undo that damage.



It may very well turn out that the upcoming conferences will see a lot
of such information released and the VMS customer base will be given the
warm & fuzzy ffeling about the future of VMS and 3rd party re-committing
to VMS.

However, if that doesn't happen "soon", you may find the remaining VMS
customer base starting to doubt whether this revival effort will be too
little too late.

The longer it takes for that info to come out, the more "umph!" that
info will need to have an impact on the customers.



Note that it is quite possible VSI will use the old DEC strategy of no
marketing and talking directly to customers. They may very well be
telling them privately that Oracle has sigballed theu will support VMS
on x86. This may be enough to stem the exodus begun by the HP
announcements, but we won't know about it, and it misses out on a great
PR oppoprtunity to make noise about big ISVs re-committing to VMS.