[Info-vax] The real problem that needs solving to grow VMS

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/1/2022 9:02 PM, David Goodwin wrote:
> Growing OpenVMS will mostly mean selling it to organisations who aren't currently
> using OpenVMS, have no investment in custom OpenVMS software, have quite
> possibly never even heard of OpenVMS or assume it went extinct long ago,
> and are probably running their current workload on Linux. And Linux will
> probably do the job fine for whatever new project they might consider OpenVMS
> for. If they're paying for linux at all, they might be paying under $1k/year/server
> (based on their online stores, Redhat Enterprise Server starts at US$349 and
> Ubuntu Pro somewhere around $225-500).

"starts" is correct. Add 24x7 support, smart management, HA and
resilient storage and it says 2847.

Which is way too much in some contexts and totally insignificant in
other contexts.

Obviously VSI wants to target the latter.

> What does OpenVMS bring to the table that makes it worth considering for
> these organisations? Is it perhaps cheaper to license than RHEL? Is it easier to
> develop for? Have some "killer app"? Is its clustering actually better than the
> approaches typically taken on Linux to achieve the same tasks?
> 
> What *could* OpenVMS bring to the table to make it worth considering if
> enough development effort was applied to the right projects?

I think there is a fundamental flawed assumption on how most goods
are sold.

It is not like X is better than Y and Z so X get 100% of the market
while Y and Z gets 0%.

When products are different then some will choose X, some will
choose Y and some will choose Z.

I am sure that Redhat will sell way more licenses than VSI,
but VSI will be fine even with that.

Arne