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

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2014-09-13 14:31:04 +0000, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply said:

> 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?

The x86-64 port is probably ~four years end-to-end, maybe longer — this 
from initial designs to a viable and supportable environment with the 
major third-party products ready — as a guess, and you're far less able 
to update the operating system and its features while the port is 
underway.   (Data: Starting with an existing and established 
engineering team, the last port occurred between June, 2001 and 
January, 2005 for a subset of Itanium systems.)

The port is much smaller than the updates involved in updating the 
operating system to be competitive, in my estimation.

OS X Server is so massively past VMS now in most ways.  While I'm 
"unfairly" comparing VMS to OS X Server now, in five or ten years, OS X 
Server will be closer to where everybody else will probably be, or 
expect.  Windows Server is getting both easier and more capable as 
well, and Exchange Server is one of the best available platforms for 
business computing.

The OS is increasingly a hardware abstraction layer and a bag of 
drivers for the higher-level tools and applications most folks care 
about.  Where that abstraction layer isn't already a virtual machine.


> 
>> 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.

Computing was simpler back in the DEC VMS days.  Mainframes, 
superminis, minis, and microcomputers, or however that market was 
sliced up.

User expectations were much lower, and computer usage was far from ubiquitous.

Now?  Covering the market means products from mobile devices using 
touch-based and voice APIs, to thousands-of-CPUs-NUMA boxes, to 
massive-scale hosted (cloud) services.

Which is well beyond the old MicroVAX to VAX 9000 range.

Good luck with resolving the compromises and the packaging differences 
that'd inherent in this wrist-to-cloud quest, too, and with then with 
profitably drawing in enough customers.  Power management and battery 
life, differences in default optimizations for performance or for 
thermal or battery, efficient sleep versus selective power-down, 
substantial UI differences, etc.


> 
>> 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.

Continued DECwindows X as the front-end will undoubtedly continue, but 
most folks will find that grossly insufficient as a desktop.

> 
>> 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.  :-)

Call back in five years or so, and we'll see how things look.

> 
>> 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.

I've transferred rather less between the desktop and the VMS systems 
than among the desktop systems and the primary (non-VMS) servers, and 
that's far from unusual from what I've seen of folks.  Then there are 
the fairly common tasks such as shuffling operating system patches and 
layered products around, tasks which really shouldn't need to involve 
other platforms in general.   Put another way, VMS isn't central to 
most business computing.  Not any more.  VSI is undoubtedly interested 
in changing that, but that's no small project, and getting VMS back to 
a more central role is a massive and concerned effort, and no small 
investment and no small effort in drawing in partners and third-party 
product vendors to (try to) make that happen.

As for getting files to and from VMS servers, CIFS / Samba and WebDAV 
can and do work here, though the ports involved could definitely use 
stability and ease-of-use updates and newer versions, better 
integration and there's certainly room to add other services on VMS.  
Also see Samba's migration to GPL3 for its source code, which means 
you're either moving VMS over to open source (HP probably has a say 
there, too), or you're finding and integrating, or are rolling your own 
alternative servers.

> 
>> 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.

VMS is exceedingly ill-suited for home users.  Entering that market 
puts you up against Windows, OS X, Android and iOS among other choices, 
too.  All of which have large installed bases, large numbers of 
applications, and low prices.  For example, Windows laptop prices are 
now starting at US$200.  Where are those same prices and where are the 
system capabilities going to be, in five or ten years, too?

I'm certainly interested in hearing more about what VSI is up to from 
the Boot Camp, and as they release their initial products.  But make no 
mistakes, this is a series of huge projects they've embarked upon, and 
that's before any sort of wrist-to-cloud expansion is considered.  VSI 
needs to get their revenue streams established, then figure out what 
and how much their current and potential customers are going to buy.



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