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

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 11/2/2022 9:23 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2022-11-01, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 11/1/2022 10:02 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>>>
>>> What is the argument you would make that is strong enough to persuade them
>>> to go with VMS in spite of the problems involved with doing so ?
>>>
>>> Until you can answer that question, you are not going to be selling VMS
>>> into brand new sites.
>>
>> No - I am thinking like someone that does not get his
>> understanding of IT decision making from reading Dilbert.
>>
> 
> In that case, you should be able to understand that people are not
> interested in getting fired and losing their pension and salary for
> trying something new that comes with major risks of its own without
> a VERY good reason for trying that something new.
> 
> You correctly talk about only small numbers being required to try VMS
> compared to the industry as a whole.

We all know the "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM", "Nobody
ever got fired for choosing Microsoft", "Nobody ever got fired for
choosing Java".

And it is very funny. But it has very little to do with the real world.

For individual contributors it may be a safe choice to stay
mainstream - everybody else is doing it so you can't fire me for
bad performance.

But at the decision maker aka CIO level only results counts -
excuses does not matter.

The CEO-CIO discussion would go like:

CEO: I am not happy that project X failed
CIO: Not my fault I choose the same platform as everybody else
CEO: I don't care - it failed and it does matter what everybody else do
CEO: Out of curiosity - did it fail other places and you still picked it 
or is everybody else except you able to get it working?
CIO: I will go clean my desk

And it should be pretty obvious from history that the decision makers
are not always making the same decision as everybody else. If they
did then the IT landscape would change very little. But the IT landscape
is constantly changing - 1990 was different from 1980, 2000 was
different from 1990, 2010 was different from 2000 and 2020 was
different from 2010. That is only possible because decision makers
make other decisions than what everybody else does.

> You have not yet talked about _why_ even those small numbers would be
> persuaded to try VMS. IOW, you have not yet answered the question I asked
> at the start of this thread.

There has been examples - you just did not recognize it.

You need to think of the market not the individual decision.

For the individual decision there will be a specific reason to
make a specific decision.

But if you look at maybe 500000 decision makers making decision
for 1 million solutions involving 5 million servers, then
they are not all going to apply the same analysis and logic
and end up with the same result. They will have different
background, different priorities, different experiences and
will end up with different decisions.

Some decisions will be more likely than other. There will
be a lot more picking Linux than VMS. But some will pick
VMS (the premise is still that VMS clears all the "must haves").
The uncertainty in such a large number of decision processes
will ensure that.

Of course each decision will still have something driving
that decision. But it does not need to be a particular important
reason or for that matter a particular good reason.

It could be purely technical based: we like the deep integration
of cluster in VMS, we like the batch system in VMS, we like VMS
calling convention etc..

It could be risk based: we like the fact that VMS code base
is small, we like the fact that VMS code base is very stable,
we like to use different OS'es so all systems it not at risk
when a vulnerability is found so we pick VMS for some tasks.

It could be totally non-technical: the last project used
Linux and failed so it has to be something else let us randomly
pick VMS, the CIO used VMS in his first job 30 years ago, the
CIO played golf with Johan Gedda recently.

None of these will apply to huge part of decisions.

But if each of them apply to 0.05% of decisions and we use
the numbers above then it adds up to 4500 picks of VMS
for 22500 servers.

My guess is that VSI would be very happy even with a
much smaller number.

Arne