[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-29 09:13:20 +0000, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk said:

> On Friday, 29 May 2015 00:25:10 UTC+1, David Froble  wrote:
>> 
>> I'm thinking that VSI knows who their customers are.  Check the map  :-)
>> 
>> Their best bet is to service their customers.  A really bad bet would 
>> be> to go after IBM, again, which is part of how we got to where we are 
>> now.
> 
> VSI know who yesterday's VMS customers were.

Those customers are also today's and tomorrow's customers.   This for 
the next several years and probably out past the availability of the 
x86-64 port; when the VSI developers can really be turned loose on 
enhancements and improvements and updates.  (Now where the computing 
market will be in ~2020?  Donno.)

> DEC knew a bit about who yesterday's customers were too. DEC didn't 
> know (or didn't properly think about) who their customers (not just VMS 
> customers) were going to be in (say) three years time. The HQ message 
> seemed to be 'same customers, bigger value sales' (added to a bit of 
> bravura about taking on IBM), ignoring the reality that what was good 
> enough for lots of people was getting cheaper each year.

If you're funding and running a large sales force — whether salaried or 
particularly commissioned — that's the only direction you can try to 
expand.  Going the other direction is a bigger change, and one that 
various of your existing (big) customers won't like.   (Simply having 
your customers call up a sales representative to buy a US$100 software 
license and get a paper package printed and mailed and then typed into 
some registration mechanisms just isn't cost-effective for anybody 
involved, but I digress.)  Sure, your existing customers will like the 
lower prices, but can you make up those losses with increased sales 
volumes?  Cannibalizing your own products and your own services is 
tough, and it also usually requires you to have relatively few cost 
centers.

> VSI have a bit more focus than DEC/CPQ/HQ.

Vastly more.  Though with less access to the hardware platform teams — 
Nemonix may well change that — and to other corporate-internal software 
and tools, projects and expertise.

> VSI still need to think about not just yesterday's customers, but
> tomorrow's as well. Who those customers might be, and (as you
> rightly point out) who they probably are not going to be.
> 
> Fingers crossed they're in a good position to do so.

Ayup; whether VSI can expand beyond the current OpenVMS market.   That 
will take a whole lot of work and a whole lot of insight into where the 
market is headed, more than a little patience, and a willingness to 
take on more than a little financial risk.

> ps
> in a couple of years time it will be VMS's 40th birthday (taking 
> release date as birth date). VMS will be middle aged.
> 
> Some people seem to think new is inherently improved; that young is hip 
> and cool. After all, that tactic works so well for cheap and cheerful 
> consumer goods and for fashion victims, so much of
> the IT market has adopted the same tactics.
> 
> On the other hand, in the field of real engineering, incremental 
> improvement over time is usually a *virtue*.

Some of that new stuff is junk.  Some of it is not.  Some of the new 
stuff is massively useful.   Some is marketing.

But assume that the marketing means there's a poor or questionable 
product involved — or that a "less good" product won't sell in massive 
quantities and thus undercut your products — at your peril.

This is how more than a few existing markets have gotten torpedoed from below.

Some of the old environments — OpenVMS included — are much harder to 
work on and develop for than some of the newer environments, too.  
That's based on my experience, and my own familiarity with how OpenVMS 
works.  For better or worse, large walls of documentation and dozens of 
PDF files just aren't the sorts of things that many folks are 
interested or willing or able to read through — developers have work to 
get done.  As often as I've pointed folks to the documentation, that's 
increasingly not something that folks are able to invest the time and 
effort necessary to read through.  This feeds back into tool designs, 
massively easier and faster search tools, examples and a whole host of 
other details that can allow a programmer to work more quickly.  Also 
into the sorts of user interfaces and the application frameworks and 
libraries and abstractions that are available, too.




-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC