[Info-vax] Building for Customers, Revenue (was: Re: Bliss was Re: Learning VMS application programming)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2014-09-13 10:23:52 +0000, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply said:

> In article <lv01mf$5ou$1 at news.albasani.net>, Jan-Erik Soderholm
> <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> writes:
> 
>> The major problem with that is that there is no market with paying 
>> customers waiting for a local brower running in VMS.
> 
> Maybe not now.  Maybe if VSI takes off, there will be more of a market.

Best case and assuming a massive budget for development, that's most of 
a decade of very intensive work to bring the server features forward to 
what will then be current, and probably twice that effort would need to 
be invested to create a viable desktop — and probably a desktop that 
too few folks would want.

VSI is undoubtedly going to focus on and cater to the VMS installed 
base, allowing the installed base to do what they do now, hopefully 
better, and hopefully on commodity hardware.

VSI will likely also solicit customers that need a bespoke operating 
system or specific features, where they can find and manage and support 
those customers and those projects.

Trying to directly compete with Linux or BSD servers, or going against 
Windows Server features, is a vastly larger investment.  One that 
appears very likely to fail, too.

Desktops are too large a project, and competing against folks that can 
give away their software is difficult.

For servers, you're stuck between "free" and what Windows Server or 
RHEL charges (including support) as your target price range for 
acquiring new customers, at least until you're reasonably competitive 
with or can surpass Windows Server with Active Directory and Exchange 
Server and/or RHEL capabilities and familiarity.  Existing VMS 
customers will pay more, as porting is a hassle.

There just aren't enough Phillip-like customers in the world.

It's true that getting to the point where porting applications to VMS 
starts to get easier would be beneficial.  This includes web browsers, 
and other packages.   Porting has been getting harder for a number of 
years now, as the existing and installed versions get older, and as the 
number and complexity of the open source dependencies of various 
packages increases.

Whether incrementally adding new features and porting to x86-64 and 
easing open-source ports will provide sufficient and sustainable 
revenues is unclear.

Developers and partners aren't interested in older platforms and older 
tools, and would need very marketable (and profitable) reasons to 
overlook gaps in the product offerings, such as the existing VMS gaps 
around IDEs, compiler standards, networking, security, etc.

Having VMS moving forward is goodness.  But do not underestimate the 
scale of the effort involved here, nor the difficulty involved with 
drawing in more and new customers.

>> Far better to run the browser in your desktop environment and let VMS 
>> serve the content.
> 
> But then one needs a desktop environment in addition to VMS.  Not  
> everyone has that, or wants that.  I appreciate the ability to download 
>  and upload stuff from VMS, especially stuff which I use on VMS anyway.

Pretty much everybody already has a non-VMS desktop environment, Phillip.

Your isolation from general computing and your ability to deal with 
hassles and complexity — having myself kept a VMS desktop for ~20 years 
— is clearly prodigious.




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