[Info-vax] relaunch or legacy

[Gérard Calliet]

Le 02/02/2022 à 22:44, John Dallman a écrit :
> 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?
I meant policy, and policy about pricing, subscription.
> 
>>> 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?
Unequal, unfair, distorted competition, monopoly situation. All that in 
the domain of integration and services.
VSI takes over a domain which was not that of the OS supplier. Its 
situation makes this taking over an unbalanced one (monopoly).
Besides that, the commercial policy, which is on the type "one to one" 
favors the very few close acquaintances of vsi.
It is not a healthy situation. I think an ecosystem can survive if it is 
worth it to use and contribute to commercialize it not only for the one 
supplier. On the contrary if you are not a huge company, you get an 
implosion.
> 
>> 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 ecosyste
>> 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.
Perhaps what you say is the effective calcul of VSI.

The effect is transforming a fragile niche market in a desert.
> 
>> 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 understood that. I was just saying they don't negociate with groups, 
and your advice cannot work, if you tried it you'll experience it.
> 
>> 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.
I'm speaking just on the opposite direction. Not in the details, but in 
the general intuition from what someone expect he can invest, the axis 
he thinks is good to succeed.

I suppose there exist domains in industry, IT, where the old idea of 
investment continues to exist. An idea, an analysis of its adoption by 
customers, and so an investment. In this logic, the investor has some 
big picture in the brain. I'm speaking of that.

I know the investment now is hugely another sort of method. Statitics, 
excel analysis, huge amount of financement, playing exclusively with 
what is "in the trend".

Perhaps the old classic way of investment still exists, and I think that 
investment on VMS had been on that style. However it cannot be on the 
side of the billion investments. If it were VSI would not have ressource 
problems. It is a smart and small investment.

My point is VSI has to continue being smart, and exploit what is at the 
root of the intuition the investor had. It is not at all trivial.
> 
>> 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.
No, it is a lot more general than that. It is about long term cycles of 
application development. Cyclic investment. Reusability. Sobriety. Local 
mastery.
> 
>> 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.
I see that. It is a problem of sense of an investment. Very difficult to 
understand. As I said elsewhere, it was somehow a madness to invest on 
VMS. ALl the excel indicators were saying it was follish to think about 
a future for VMS. But the investor took the bet, and they did it.


>> 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?
How can I answer that without serious survey and market inquiry? You 
give me argument to claim for that.
> 
>> 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.
Do you see you are in contradiction with yourself? If anybody cannot 
take notice of long term promises, what about 2014 x86 promise in 2021? 
And of course during this time another priority is building trust with 
of-the-day deliverable.

And you don't see on the other side that a large part of the market for 
VMS has totally different agenda. 5 years is a little bit short period 
for them. THe chance for VMS is to cope with this sort of agenda. And, 
again, if you think in the big style, you get the intuition that the new 
trend of sustainability is going to create market for the one who need 
to get long time agenda.

- just for fun -
A song of the old time "the time there are a changin". what happens to 
the investment when the time scales start to change?  How, there, to 
apply the Lorents transformation?

> 
> John


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