[Info-vax] relaunch or legacy

[John Dallman]

In article <j5vr7pF1m43U1 at mid.individual.net>,
gerard.calliet at pia-sofer.fr (Gérard Calliet) wrote:

> > Here, you are unclear. Do you mean "policy" or "politics"? It 
> > makes a significant difference to the statement.
> You are just kidding? Thousands of line about, pricing, 
> subscriptionq. Request of being brief. And know "could you explain 
> the choice of this word". Seriously?

"Politic" is not a common English word. If you meant "policy", then
that's quite clear, but the word you used is not an easy mis-spelling of
that. 

If you meant "politics", which is a much more plausible error, then you
seem to be alleging the VSI has motives other than commercial ones. 

So what were you saying? 

> > Are you sure that there is enough budget from VMS user organisations 
> > sustain both the intermediaries and VSI? I suspect the
> > intermediaries see potential competition, and nothing makes 
> > a consultant moan like competition.
> You are not clear :) What do you mean by "VMS user organisations" 
> (clubs, customers, consultants?). You are saying a customer cannot 
> pay for consultancy And VSI, perhaps. And the selfish consultant do 
> moan about competition.

No, that wasn't clear. I meant to ask: given the various people and
organisations in France who have budgets for OpenVMS, do they have enough
total budget to sustain both the consultants and a slice of VSI? 

> You are quite right, you get the point, it is about competition. 
> Inegal competition of course.

"Inegal"? Is this a typo for "unequal," or something else?  

> The point is: is it possible for the ecosystem VMS to have just a 
> monopoly in front of individual customers?
> 
> Is this model possible in a long term for VMS? Is VSI able to work 
> like IBM or Microsoft? Or the survival of the entire ecosystem 
> depends on its capacy to develop as a net business?

As far as I know, the long-term survival of the ecosystem does depend on
VSI. Without them, there will be no more updates. That doesn't mean VSI
has to take all the budgets, but it likely will need to get some of the
budget that's currently going to consultants. 

> Please help us, John. They don't negociate at all with (french?) 
> groups.

I have no stake in this game. I work for an ISV that gave up supporting
OpenVMS at about v7. I joined this newsgroup because I'm interested in
operating systems, and there was a possibility that long-term customers
might want OpenVMS again. There have, however, been no requests so far. 

> I speak at the level the investor had to choice to invest in 
> VMS, and at the level of choices of strategy the board and ceo has 
> to make the investment successfull.

You may be assuming too much about the investor's motives and plans. Such
things are not always planned in great detail. 

> The source I see is the fact VMS, which is somehow sustainable, 
> encounters an era where sustainability is hugely in demand. Exploit 
> that!

Here I'm not sure I understand you. I /think/ you're saying that if VMS
were to become less demanding in the hardware and energy it requires,
that this could make it far more popular? Well, maybe, but getting from
here to there is going to be a lot of work, and it isn't obvious that VMS
is the best operating system for the job. Google and Amazon are doing
quite a lot of that with ARM-based Linux in their clouds. 

> You get it? So you understand now why the investor bet about VMS 
> was hugely good, and you know now why the relaunch is, yes, a very 
> discrete event, but just the one which does the little genius 
> difference.

Afraid not, no. 

> No doing survey and hearing customers and accepting collaborations 
> is not a huge amount of cost. Not doing that is lossing a huge 
> amount of resources accumulated in 4 decades.

You need to substantiate that. How many sites running VMS? How many
machines? What proportion of them in business-critical roles? What
applications and services have been created by end-users? What has been
created by consultants? 

> And no, no and no, reread your manual of logic. The necessary is 
> not the sufficient. x86 is necessary, it is not sufficient. And a 
> priority is not an exclusivity.

You seem to be saying that in France, customers want to see large-scale
plans years in advance, and won't mind if they suffer multi-year delays? 

In the US, people with grand plans they'll deliver in five years time
don't get listened to. Anybody can come up with plans that sound good. So
nobody takes any notice of them: you need something deliverable before
you can get commitments. 

John