[Info-vax] Building for Customers, Revenue

[JF Mezei]

On 14-09-13 14:50, Stephen Hoffman wrote:

> VSI has a whole slew of possibilities here with their VMS, and they're 
> going to have to figure out where to best invest their resources and on 
> which partners and customers they should focus, and how to price and 
> support their products. 


I think it is a bit more involved than that. Contrary to the good old
days at DEC where DEC forced customers to beg for the privilege of being
allowed to buy DEC gear, VSI now has to seek markets and compete to gain
customers.

If VSI waits for customers to tell it what they want,  VSI may wait a
long time.

And while their hands are full of work to take VMS out of HP's paliative
care and process it through intensive care for rescussitation during the
port, they should already be thinking about what they will want VMS to
do once it can run on x86.

And it is not an easy job because long lead times means greater
uncertainty fopr predictionr on what the server market will be like a
few years down the road.

But they really need to start planning what features are to be
priorities, especially since the port to x86 (and initial work on the
geriatric Itanium) allow the enginieers to identify affected sectiosn
and even plant foundations/hooks for the work that will be done later.

For instance, knowing that you will want a new file system, and a DCL
interface that allows easy specification of modern file names, when you
play with VMS now, you can identify all modules that will need to be
updated when that work begins, and that allows VSI to better estimate
the amount of work to be done.

Right now, this isn't anout delivering changes, it is all about planning
for the changes.