[Info-vax] Life after Digital

[Michael Kraemer]

In article <0094e693$0$27969$c3e8da3 at news.astraweb.com>, JF Mezei
<jfmezei.spamnot at vaxination.ca> writes:
> 
> The market share of OS-2 actually rose during a couple of years because
> Microsoft was late with what was eventually called Windows 95.

By the time W95 came around OS/2 was already a lost case,
at least in consumer space.
In fact OS/2 already lost against W3.1.
 
> But Microsoft launched a marketing juggernaut with Windows 95, a tidal
> wave nobody could resist. And everyone had been promised Windows 95
> would be solid, robust, trustable.

I don't remember people buying it for being robust.
They lined up in front of retail stores because it was the next cool toy. 
Gates knew years before people would want a new toy.
 
> In the case of VMS, there was no attempt to market it, except in 2000,
> the short lived "renaissance" period where modest marketing in selected
> countries caused a near 10% rise in sales.

I've yet to be convinced that there's any evidence that the two incidents are
connected.
The usual VMS crowd isn't supposed to be susceptible to short term
marketing.
 
> Nobody is saying VMS needs to take over/replace Windows. Apple is quite
> profitable and can afford great development and innovations in its
> products even though it has less than 5% of the market for computers (I
> heard 3.5% but am not sure if this is correct).

The difference is, that 5% of the desktop translates
into several million Macs per year, enough to exist as a separate standard.
5% of the server market is almost nothing.
 
> Once people reaslised Microsoft wasn't ready for the enterprise, there
> were many opportunities for VMS to take back some market share. Doesn't
> mean it has to regain its former heydays, but modest gains in sales
> would greatly help give it momentum.

You forgot that at least at that time the main competitor
wasn't windoze but Unix/Linux plus possibly the remaining "proprietary" OSs.
 
> Both Linux and Apple started from basically scratch in the late 1990s
> and were able to build a very respectable market share AND portfolio of
> available applications.

Both didn't start in the late 1990s, but much earlier.
Apple was already well-known, just MacOS was rapidly ageing
when compared to M$ products. Putting Unix under the hood
and giving people those cool new iApps saved the company.

I haven't heard much about cool new apps for VMS in decades.
So there's not much to be marketed.
 
> VMS could have done that. Its owners chose to not even try, despite the
> "renaissance" providng it was rather easy to get VMS to grow with very
> modest marketing.