[Info-vax] Comment on the future of OpenVMS

[Neil Rieck]

On Oct 27, 5:48 am, seasoned_geek <rol... at logikalsolutions.com> wrote:
[...snip...]
>
> I give it less than eight years actually.  At the end of that time
> span there should be enough high profile catastrophes (bigger than the
> last one I heard about at Caterpillar) which send Oracle over to HP to
> purchase VMS, add some Unix window dressing (but not actual Unix just
> some commands and displays to make it "feel" kind of like Unix to the
> die hards) to it, and re-brand it as Oracle Enterprise Unix or simply
> Oracle Enterprise OS.  If they had even the tiniest shred of technical
> savy they would port it to an AMD CPU while they were at it.

This speculation contains the ring of truth but let me bring up a
related point. In my little world I have recently noticed something
(again) that will be of no surprise to anyone here. Projects only
succeed if they contain a critical mass of people with a passion for
their work. This also seems true if the passion runs right up to the
executive level.

Most companies, including HP and Oracle, have exported quite a bit of
work to India. This supposed cost-saving action will only work if the
Indians have passion for their work -AND- their respective masters
have a passion for managing them. If these companies outsourced work
to India with the idea that the North American managers wouldn't be
involved in actively managing the Asian talent, then their corporate
fruits will wither on the vine.

I have also noticed that upper management at all companies also need
to be passionate for what they do (and here I am talking about
computer technology, not stock options or bonuses). Ellision is still
at the top of Oracle but has also surrounded himself with people
passionate for computers. At Microsoft, it was Gates who had passion
for this business and Ballmer was just his buddy from school. The
change from Gates to Ballmer isn't necessarily a bad thing as long as
Ballmer keeps computer people around him (I think that Gates is still
a majority share holder so maybe Gates is still in control behind the
scenes). At HPQ, we have seen questionable people (Curly, Carly)
running things that didn't seem to have a clue about computer
technology. Hurd is running things now after rising up through the
ranks at NCR, but I sometimes question the passion level of the people
around him. This might be one reason why they decided to jettison >300
hardware engineers to Intel during Alphacide.

So in conclusion, if Oracle remains passionate about computer
technology -AND- they think they can make a buck buying OpenVMS from
HP -AND- HP has less or little passion for OpenVMS -THEN- a purchase
is inevitable. Who knows, maybe selling OpenVMS will be necessary one
day in order for HP to balance their books after a bad year of PC
sales.

NSR