[Info-vax] relaunch or legacy

[John Dallman]

In article <j5i7jlFten1U1 at mid.individual.net>,
gerard.calliet at pia-sofer.fr (Gérard Calliet) wrote:

> . . . I think I'm the only one who says VSI can succeed. Others
> (customers and consultants)all say VMS will die in 3 or 5 years. 
> The differences are only between angst and anger.

So what are the customers and consultants wanting or expecting that they
are not seeing? There are some things that they cannot have:

* VSI /are not DEC/ and they should not pretend that they are. If they
tried that, they'd fail at it rapidly and comprehensively, which would be
really bad for their credibility. If the French want DEC back, they're
going to have to learn to live with disappointment. 

* The number of working Alpha and Itanium systems in the world is finite,
and will decrease over time. They can't be put back into production,
unless someone wants to give Intel /extraordinary/ amounts of money,
either to make some more chips, or in exchange for the intellectual
property. The latter then requires paying someone to make more chips, in
a world where the market for them is very limited, and there is a
shortage of chip manufacturing capacity. 

* HPE did not consider the remaining market for VMS to be worth their
while. If they did, they'd still be exploiting it. So customers cannot
have the assurance of a large company as their supplier. VSI is a much
smaller company, set up in the hope of being able to do the job of
maintaining and supporting VMS more cheaply than HPE. Their reasons for
that hope are the ability to acquire some of the ex-DEC engineers, and to
employ them in a more congenial working environment than HPE provided,
making them more productive. This is working to some extent, although
it's taking longer than planned. Software tends to, and I think we all
knew that beforehand. 

French customers and consultants need to weigh the risks of VSI not
succeeding against the costs of a transition to a different platform.
Because if VSI fails, that /will/ be the end for VMS. 

> My point. On my side I see that as the bad idea. I agree without 
> x86 in some future, nothing is possible. But because the time to 
> x86 is long - more long every year - it is important to cope with a 
> very long transition, and so the unique goal x86 cannot work. 

So you're saying - you're not very clear here - that VSI needed to create
a scheme to ensure that replacement Itanium hardware was available for
years to come? 

Well, that might have been logistically possible if they placed large
orders for Itanium chips when Intel was still making them, and paid HPE
to manufacture systems. But it would have been financially impossible.
The investment required would have been huge, and the odds of recovering
it very poor. VSI simply didn't have that kind of money to expend. In any
case, it is now too late. 

If you're only saying that VSI needed to offer Itanium versions of
OpenVMS 9.x, that's a smaller demand. However, VSI have no magical method
of getting Itanium systems for their own use, and if they were to offer
OpenVMS 9.x on Itanium, they'd need to keep running the equipment for a
long time. So I can see why they aren't doing it. 

> And even if we had now x86, a port is always a big decision(remember 
> the ports to alpha or itannium), we have the problem of ISV.

I work for an ISV, doing porting work. That is actually my profession.
And sometimes, you just have to do ports, even if your ego and your
business plans don't like the idea. 

> The logic had to be we will port to x86 because VMS is good for us 
> for x, y, z questions, notably the confort that give us VSI we'll 
> try a port to x86. And not: because you will have x86 you have to 
> be with VMS now, even with sacrifices. It is this logic which 
> doesn'nt work.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're trying to say here. 

> No. Marketing had to be and has to be made about VMS intrinsics. 
> Same idea.

Or here. 

> The point today is business success, gaining again trust from 
> customers. And they are not stupid: we have to answer objective 
> things to their abjective angsts.

The first step in this is understanding what they're worried about. If it
is that the future of VMS is not secure, they're entirely right about
that, and they need to consider the relative risks of their few courses
of action. 

John