[Info-vax] relaunch or legacy

[John Dallman]

In article <j5v64gFdt84U1 at mid.individual.net>,
gerard.calliet at pia-sofer.fr (Gérard Calliet) wrote:

> You are right. I'm a little bit too melodramatic.

No, you're just too verbose and unclear. 

> My position is somehow difficult: I'm between people who say 
> everything is fine, don't critic

I'm not saying everything is fine. But you do not make clear and specific
points. 

> 1) You understood the major point: the commercial politic of VSI 
> cannot be accepted by the customers.

Here, you are unclear. Do you mean "policy" or "politics"? It makes a
significant difference to the statement. 

> 2) The second major point is VSI wants to "take all" in the market, 
> and number of intermediaries give up from VSI VMS for this reason 
> (I have examples in France and in Europ, I cannot give the names).

Are you sure that there is enough budget from VMS user organisations to
sustain both the intermediaries and VSI? I suspect the intermediaries see
potential competition, and nothing makes a consultant moan like
competition. 

> 3) VSI is totally deaf in discussion with users clubs.

An English nuance: "clubs" sounds like hobbyist groups. VSI are mainly
interested in businesses with money to spend. If you're talking to them
on behalf of a user group, you need to tell them about its members and
their budgets and substantiate your information. 

A personal opinion: French philosophers, especially the postmodernist
ones, have done the intellectual reputation of France a great deal of
damage in the last few decades. Among English-speakers who do physical
sciences and engineering, a Frenchman who writes at great length and in a
confusing style is thereby assumed to be disconnected from reality and
fundamentally unimportant. You've been sabotaging yourself. 

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair, and consider that when
you're dealing with English-speaking engineers, you're dealing with
people who find it highly amusing, and demonstrative of the emptiness and
meaninglessness of French-derived intellectualism. 

> There are negociations in the one to one mode (with the great 
> companies), not any negotiation on a general mode.
> This choice makes the market totally unfair, generally untrustable 
> and close the market for the small and medium companies.

Two strategies are obvious here:

1) Demonstrate the size and combined budget of your user group and
negotiate as a group.

2) Have one company go first, and share its results with other companies,
making it easier for them to get similar deals. 

However, no negotiating strategy will do any good unless you can clearly
communicate what you want. You still haven't managed that. 

> 5) Very difficult to understand the real structure of the company 
> (europ, usa? teracloud, VSI?) and the choices in the key managers. 
> Not any transparency on the real results an investment ratios.

Presumably you want to know these things to judge VSI's commitment to
OpenVMS? If you explain it that way, you may get better answers. 

Your choices are quite limited: VSI, or abandoning OpenVMS. HPE aren't
going to return to supporting VMS; they would have abandoned it already
if VSI had not been set up. 

> a1) A lot of people expect VSI is going to fail. My opinion is that 
> VSI can succeed if they dramatically change they strategy and 
> relation with their customers basis. And I fear they'll not change 
> anything.

It depends what you mean by "fail." How about this for a definition of
success? 

  At the start of 2027, VSI revenue from OpenVMS is larger than it is 
  today at the start of 2022 and has grown during 2025 and 2026. 

> a2) If it is a failure, VMS will enter the category of legacy 
> systems, and we'll do "maintenance in operational condition" (I 
> don't know the exact english term, in french "maintenance en 
> condition opérationnelle, MCO"). What I'm now already doing for 
> freezed sites on VAX/VMS.

I am not quite sure what you mean, but there are no standardised English
terms for this. Individual companies may have private standards, but they
are unlikely to be more widely understood. How about explaining what you
mean? 

> b1) I think the reason of a bad choice of strategy (my opinion) is 
> to confuse relaunch and legacy, and not to really take the 
> opportunity of large new needs on sustainable development, green 
> IT, reusibility...

What do those things /mean/ at an engineering level? You keep coming back
to them, but you don't indicate what actions would be required. They
sound like assurances for the public relations department, not a program
for engineering. 

Guessing wildly, does "sustainable development" mean "We can carry on
using our existing hardware and it won't break down?" If so, that's not
possible: the hardware was not designed or built for an indefinite life. 

Does "Green IT" mean "Using less energy?" If so, that's a good thing, but
x86 will use less energy than old Alpha or Itanium systems. Using ARM
would use even less, but when VSI started on the port, ARM server
hardware was close to non-existent. Switching to ARM now would be foolish
because it would create even more delays. Starting on ARM once x86 is
complete could make sense. 

> b2) My "batman concept". If you do a relaunch after decades of a 
> product, you have to exploit particularly the echoes that that 
> times did produce from the users. Like the bat you are able to 
> orient yourself thanks to the echoes. The major priorities would 
> have been to do strong surveys, promote relation with users club, 
> build real collaborations whith intermediary existant companies.

That's a huge amount of costly work. /VSI is not DEC/, they don't have
the people to do that all around the world. They've been tackling the
problem that certainly doomed OpenVMS if it was not solved: the absence
of hardware to run it on. 

> b3) I did'nt understand why not any marketing have been done. In 
> 2014 the relaunch could have been said as "a major event in IT 
> business".

Because, given the OpenVMS market share, it /wasn't/ a major event in the
IT industry. They knew they could not deliver anything big immediately.
Making large claims without delivery just destroys your own credibility. 

John