[Info-vax] Info-vax Digest, Vol 78, Issue 28

[Scott Dorsey]

Jack Blake  <treen0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>Can we dispel this myth?  DEC didn't fail because their hardware was too 
>good, DEC failed because they didn't change with the times, and ever 
>company that has purchased the rights to what DEC made, which was good, 
>has continued to fail for exactly that same reason.  It's almost as if 
>it's a curse at this point.  Not that that will happen to the current 
>VMS caretakers...

DEC failed because they couldn't actually deliver that technology to the
customer.  They introduced products, but they were backordered or available
only in a configuration that wasn't the one you wanted.  Digital has it now,
but you can't have any.

But what really killed DEC was their own competition.  They would introduce
two or three products that competed with one another.  No matter which won a
bid, DEC lost.

Not only did they compete with themselves, they discontinued products like
the DECSYSTEM-10 machines without actually providing a replacement for them.
They held out the vax to customers being left in the lurch with the demise
of the decsystem...  but the vax had nothing like the I/O performance and
many, many of those customers went to IBM instead.

>DEC failed because they had the cloistered mindset of Massachusetts 
>techies.  And they wondered why hippies thought tech people were 
>exclusionary and probably evil.

I'm not sure that cloistered mindset is a bad thing, especially when the
rest of the industry maintained it (and it's always good to know one's
customers).  But I am sure that if you can't provide a product and ship
that product, your accounts receiveables will suffer.
--scott

-- 
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."