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

[Phillip Helbig---undress to reply]

In article <lv1jr9$ecd$1 at dont-email.me>, Stephen Hoffman
<seaohveh at hoffmanlabs.invalid> writes: 

> 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.

How would the effort compare to the effort of porting to x86?

> 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.

I would hope so.  But many at VSI, and many customers, remember "desktop 
to datacenter".  I think that's still a good idea today.

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

I don't think that VSI should compete against "regular" desktops, but 
rather offer enough desktop support so that VMS folks don't have to run 
something else just for desktop stuff.

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

I don't know.  Just a few weeks ago, anyone who thought that there would 
be a viable port of VMS to x86, or even Poulson support, in the 
foreseeable future would have been deemed delusional.  :-)

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

But even if they do, it is a pain to constantly transfer files between 
it and VMS.

> 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. 

:-)

I do have some experience with other systems, desktop and otherwise, but 
at home do almost all desktop stuff from VMS.  It would be nice to be 
able to do it all.