[Info-vax] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.os.vms/v07C_K7KzCg%5B1-25%5D

[gérard Calliet]

Hello,

Now I'm about to be 64, as in the beatles song, and much more close to 
retirement than in 2014.

I was searching comp.os.vms archive for the advice of some of my gurus 
(no name), and I found this topic.

What is striking me in the quoted topic is the way the micro-community 
of comp.os.vms is often constructing its advice.

Perhaps the sentence of our community is "nothing new under the sun".

The way VSI redoes Digital, the way we worship The company, the way VSI 
redoes the old tricks to do a "good business" are very similar the way 
we were here moking the "french fight the dead of OpenVMS". Nothing can 
change is our faith.

Such persistence in conservatism has something moving about it.

On my side, however, I do like museum, but I don't think VMS has to go 
now on museum, and so I hope the old guys can think anew about new times.

I'm very found of my Great Britain foreigners, and I do like New 
Hampshire - I visited with emotion The Mill -. But I cannot think 
rebuilding the Common Wealth after the Brixit could be successfull, as 
rebuilding a centralized new Digital (the Terry "clearing house") could 
ever be a success.

The only chance for VMS is to rebuild its ecosystem with new paradigms, 
and to build on its core values by assessing how interesting they are in 
the period.

The models which can be successfull now are more horizontal. VSI is 
already present on two continents. We know all of the failure for 
Digital has been the difficulty of coordinating all its entities. What 
has been a trap for Digital which was struturally centralized could be a 
condition for success for VSI if they "think different", and create way 
of collaborating business in several places.

The good topology for emergent startup is archipello. And the 
(anti-"clearing house") good marketing sentence is "VMS is good for Your 
business". If VSI is able to encourage myriad of little consultant 
companies to make good business with VMS, the world wide support will be 
efficient, sustainable, visible. Another way of saying that, which we 
learned from Open Source business ecosytems is: "be fair, it's worth it".

The other side of the for-profit archipello is the non-fo-profit 
initiatives on Open Source for OpenVMS. An ecosytem has a lot of 
different aspects, not only the for-profit aspects. Question the 
more-than-64-year-old guys who redo VMS about their motivations.

The good news is the core values of VMS meet a major trend of these 
days: end of waste, sobriety, sustainability, reusability. It is on 
these values that VMS will prove that it is innovating in a completely 
new way, that is, by making new out of old.

It is no coincidence that VMS finds itself bought into a green group, 
but it is surprising that what is certainly an underground motivation is 
so little exploited in organizational thinking and promotion.

In the twenty next years there will be huge transformations in the way 
products are done, and in the way we choose usefull things againts 
gadgets. The same thing on computers. Here the values of VMS will meet 
the new challenges, for sure.

But we cannot fight for VMS, sell VMS, develop VMS the way it was done 
by Ken Olsen. We could have been the world company like Apple, and we 
had not this chance. For sure we'll not be a new Apple or a new Oracle. 
These adventures are now already for-musuem business paradigms. So we 
cannot sell VMS as a common product, nor develop the suppliers as they 
developped thirty years ago.

If VSI develops its activity, partnership the way did HP, I agree on the 
sentence "nothing new under the sun". The way I have been moked on 
comp.os.vms is totally right: as we had seen HP (after Compaq) acting 
for VMS there was no future for VMS. And it seems VSI acts as HP acted. 
So? It is not coincidence if VSI is beginning doing off-shore, as HP did 
to lowering costs. Duane Harris brought back VMS from India, and the 
general logic is reforwarding it. Under the sun, the same causes have 
the same effects.

See you in four or five years. Maybe there was some truth in "the French 
fight the death of OpenVMS", and maybe there is still some truth here. 
In any case, if my optimism at the time has been confirmed, and if some 
of my ideas here can be used, then we will be enjoying together a huge 
success.

Gérard Calliet