Digital BW, The Print

Hi Truman,

> It wasn't that VMS was a bad OS or that Dec
> computers were bad, the Dec management was the pits.

That's only part of the story...some was quite good.

> They literally not
> only couldn't see the workstation revolution brought on by Sun, Apollo,
> etc., it was they fought it to their death.

You're right, but that was mostly marketing's fault to start with.  They
were fat, dumb and happy...DEC was called "The Country Club", because no one
in the marketing/sales department had to work in the mid/late 80's, early
90's, people were knocking on the door to buy systems.

The other revolution that passed DEC by, was the PC market.  Though DEC did
start a dynamite PC group, and had world class notebooks and servers, and in
fact, in their third year of operation, were ranked in the top three in both
areas...didn't do desktops well at all, and were very bogged down by upper
management and corporate problems...like who got credit for what, buying DEC
made things internally was more expensive then buying them from an outside
vendor, DEC wasn't used to very fast produce development cycles, that the PC
industry required...on and on I could go.

Things were getting FAR better in the last few years, before Palmer sold his
soul...and he was partly one of the major problems with DEC in fact.  He was
only interested in what was in it for him...not what was for the good of the
company, though some stockholders were quite happy with the Compaq deal, as
they bought in at $18, and the acquisition was for one Compaq share and
$30...but...taxes were due at that time...which, I believe, is how they got
the merger past the government so easily.  That merger has caused a huge
slump here in the North East, as Compaq basically closed most everything
down up here, and there are lots of "For Lease" buildings, and a lot of
unemployed people...  Compaq really only wanted Digital's Services
organization...not really anything else, as it was the one thing they were
lacking...  It's all really quite sad.

Regards,

Austin