[Info-vax] BASIC compiler in the hobbyist distribution

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-05-29 15:33:41 +0000, johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk said:

> DECdirect UK...

Was great for its time, but is now increasingly irrelevant.   Had DEC 
and DECdirect kept going, then it would be relevant.   What DECdirect 
offered is a fraction of what VSI will need to deal with.

> Lots of people knew what needed to be done. Some got a chance to show 
> how it could be done. HQ weren't listening.

Sales channels and resellers and direct sales and commissions and 
salaried folks have been the subject of more than a few management 
debates, and there's no right answer.

For better or worse, field and management folks have been tussling for 
many years, too.  Management has data that the field does not, and the 
field has data that management didn't have — but increasingly does have 
that data now.

Whether any management team comes up with a viable strategy, and can 
execute and adapt the plan?  DEC didn't.  Whether VSI does?

Simply repeating or recalling what DEC did is very far from enough for 
the current era, much less for 2020 or 2025.   What DECdirect UK had 
then — again, as good as it then was — is now somewhere between fairly 
typical and fairly primitive for direct sales.  VSI might well decide 
to use Amazon as a front-end and maybe fulfillment, for instance.

> HQ decided...

DEC Maynard has not been relevant to computing in many years.

VSI needs to be relevant to their potential and current customers 
already using OpenVMS, and then to their potential wholly-new customers.

> Hoffman: "the sorts of user interfaces and the application frameworks 
> and libraries and abstractions that are available, too."
> 
> Build GNV and the rest will follow? Do I need half a smiley here?

GNV is a rounding error on what needs to be done to bring OpenVMS 
forward for 2020 and beyond.  GNV is very far from sufficient for 
current user interfaces, application frameworks, libraries and the 
rest.   GNV is an approach from the 1990s and into the 2000s — in its 
present guise, or as VMS-integrated POSIX or DEC/shell or otherwise — 
and it's very useful for some folks and some applications, but it's 
very far from sufficient for now, much less for OpenVMS in 2020 and 
beyond.

DEC was from a different era in the computing market, with different 
competition and wildly different computing prices and limitations and 
opportunities.  VSI can and should remember and reuse and adapt the 
best parts of what DEC was and what did, but VSI must move on.  The 
folks at VSI are not now and never will be DEC, and OpenVMS is not now 
nor ever will be what it once was, and VSI must and will change and 
OpenVMS can and will.

Where computing might be — much less direct sales — in 2020 or 2025?  
Donno.  It'll be _way_ past DECdirect and GNV, though.


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