| T.R | Title | User | Personal
Name | Date | Lines |
|---|
| 1041.1 | Think of it as evolution in action | TLE::AMARTIN | Alan H. Martin | Sun Mar 04 1990 15:59 | 5 |
| You posted the exact same note in Marketing 9 minutes before you shotgunned it
into this conference.
I take it that the death of the VAX is impacting the way you work?
/AHM
|
| 1041.2 | Somewhat Premature?? | ODIXIE::SILVERS | Gun Control: Hitting what you aim for | Mon Mar 05 1990 10:48 | 19 |
| Those of us here in the field tend to take the words out of corporate
with a grain of salt - for one thing, they change too often. As far as
the death of the VAX goes, there may be some 'managers' eulogizing it,
but the customers I deal with consider it alive and well (and yes,
healthy...) - many of them still consider Eunuchs to be a pipe dream,
or more accurately, too difficult to manage, make secure, and rely
upon.
I'm not saying that there's not a Eunuchs presence/need in the field,
there is... but I don't know of many of MY customers using it for
PRODUCTION.
Note that I use Eunuchs to get around having to put (TM) everywhere
I refer to it....{:-)}
So, I think the announcements of the 'death of the VAX'; are somewhat
premature.
However, we do need to get more 'hi margin' project business...
|
| 1041.3 | Purpose: Upwards Notification
| DELCHZ::THOMPSON | | Mon Mar 05 1990 16:48 | 16 |
| The purpose of the note was to inform corporate or whomever should be
concerned about "whats being stated out in the field" so that they can,
hopefully, take corrective measures by publishing and re-enforcing
correct policies and corporate directions.
As far as it impacting my job, it hasn't yet. The point is I don't want
premature or misguided statements to affect my job (foresight, not hindsight)
my salary, digital's margin, digital's sales or anything else that may impact
my job negatively.
As far as multiple notes files are concerned, its a measure of depth of
feeling I have on the matter and the need to get that feeling (&frustration)
out to "someone" out there that can "DO" something about it. I've done
my bit, its time for somebody upstairs to do their bit.
Greg
|
| 1041.4 | Misconceptions about "Commodity Hardware" | AUSTIN::UNLAND | Sic Biscuitus Disintegratum | Tue Mar 06 1990 14:59 | 39 |
| re: .0
"Death of the VAX"
I, too have heard this message, and I attribute it to misunderstanding.
The reality is that the VAX as a hardware/software architecture is no
longer the most important factor in a computer purchase. The primary
focus of most customers is the availability and efficiency of their
applications software; the hardware platform is often secondary. When
we go out and try to sell VAXes strictly on their own merits, we are
ignoring the customer's real reasons for buying a computer. But this
happens every day, and we continue to lose sales because of it.
"Gartner Group Report"
The comment that VAXes span the computing environment from the desktop
to the data center is marketing hype, and has little basis in either
economic reality or end-user functionality. While it is true that you
can buy single-user systems, they are far more expensive per person,
and far less efficient that the '86-based PC's. The VAX cannot compete
on hardware cost, software availability, or software capability. Up
until lately, the same held true for UNIX systems as well, but this
is changing. There are several UNIX-based PC's or workgroup servers
that can now compete with DOS systems on cost-per-user and functionality.
Ironically, we are in the same boat IBM was in years ago when DEC
started making inroads into their business. They argued that the
customers should buy their gear because it was technically superior,
and because it was IBM. The customers bought DEC because it was
cost-effective and offered capabilities not available on mainframes
at any price. Now the tables are turned on us. IBM learned, made
adjustments, and prospered. Can we do the same?
I'm not advocating that we abandon the VAX architecture. I *am*
suggesting that if we cannot enhance it with top-notch support and
software applications, that *it* will abandon *us* as a profit-maker
and drag us down into the land of DG, WANG, and UNISYS also-rans.
Geoff
|
| 1041.5 | The hardware may be a commodity, but the *product* isn't | SERENA::DONM | | Tue Mar 06 1990 15:12 | 34 |
| Whoa, how does "VAX hardware is becoming a commodity" become construed
as "death of VAX"?!?
In the computer industry, *hardware* is fast becoming a commodity,
while "systems" or "solutions" or "applications" are becoming the value
which customers seek (in general, of course).
Therefore, it's not a big stretch for Digital's marketeers to begin to
realize that VAX hardware too must be viewed as a commodity, while the
architecture itself is still viewed as a differentiated product.
Customers don't want to hear about MIPS or VUPS! Customers want to
hear what Digital is going to do to increase their (customers')
competitiveness and profit. Hardware doesn't increase competitiveness.
Solutions to business problems, enhancements to business processes, and
software applications which help businesses run more efficiently are
the "values" for which our customers are looking.
So, while VAX hardware might be a near-commodity, the robustness and
engineering excellence epitomized by the VAX architecture is still a
differentiated product. The marketing terms would be something like
this: "Core Product" = the hardware = commodity (or
near-commodity)
"Tangible Product" = the hardware + the differentiation
offered by the unique architecture + the excellence of
the engineering = VAX/VMS = differentiated product
"Augmented Product" = the hardware + the differentiation +
the quality + the ease of buying the product + the
perceived support and "warm & fuzzy feeling" from the
company + all the satisfiers and delighters leading to
*true* customer satisfaction + ... + ... +...
= something that Digital still doesn't sell
-Don-
|
| 1041.6 | Don't forget VAX ELN as well... | OLDTMR::DMCLURE | Doing the DECwrite thing | Thu Mar 08 1990 09:50 | 33 |
| re: .4,.5,
First of all, don't confuse the term "VAX" with "VMS". Don't
forget that ULTRIX runs just as nicely on a VAX as VMS, and with
ULTRIX, a customer can run all of that Unix applications software
on their desktop. In this sense, the VAX will not be replaced by
Unix.
Also, don't forget that when it comes to DECwindows applications,
it really doesn't matter whether the customer is running VMS or
ULTRIX on a VAX (or even ULTRIX on a RISC machine), as DECwindows
(or generic X-windows for that matter) applications software should
run on all of the above.
When it comes to the selection of DECwindows applications software
that DEC has to offer, I agree that we still have quite a void to fill.
Part of the problem is that while there are groups within Digital who
are working hard to produce quality DECwindows software applications,
the reality of the world is that much of the world's software is written
late at night at home by "hackers". Unfortunately, the majority of
midnight hackers within Digital probably do not have access to a DECwindows
workstation at home, whereas the hackers who produce much of the useful
PC software do have access to a [cheaper non-DEC] PC at home.
I submit that if DEC would provide a *significant* discount for
employee purchase, leasing, or simply increased availability of DECwindows
workstations for employees to take home, then the chances of massive
quantities of DECwindows applications software magically appearing (the
way PC software magically appears) would increase dramatically. Without
such home access to DEC equipment, our DECwindows workstations will most
likely suffer the same fate as the Pro-350 (i.e. lack of applications
software to run on them).
-davo
|
| 1041.7 | It's still the software that counts! | AUSTIN::UNLAND | Sic Biscuitus Disintegratum | Thu Mar 08 1990 19:22 | 20 |
| re: <<< Note 1041.6 by OLDTMR::DMCLURE "Doing the DECwrite thing" >>>
> forget that ULTRIX runs just as nicely on a VAX as VMS, and with
> ULTRIX, a customer can run all of that Unix applications software
The problem with this viewpoint is that there is no apparent argument
to buy an expensive and slower VAX to run ULTRIX when you can get a
much cheaper and faster RISC system to do the same thing.
Whether or not that is a valid comparison is beside the point. DEC
has not convinced the customer base that VAXes running ULTRIX are
a good way to go, in fact, the internal prejudices against ULTRIX
have done exactly the opposite. The bottom line is that the software
and the applications availability is far more important to the end
user than the hardware. DEC Marketing trys to counter this problem
by emphasizing quality, service, etc., but we have to clean up our
act and our reputation for that tactic to work.
Geoff
|
| 1041.8 | Here are a couple of reasons why the VAX is not dead | OLDTMR::DMCLURE | Doing the DECwrite thing | Thu Mar 08 1990 19:40 | 22 |
| re: .7,
>> forget that ULTRIX runs just as nicely on a VAX as VMS, and with
>> ULTRIX, a customer can run all of that Unix applications software
> The problem with this viewpoint is that there is no apparent argument
> to buy an expensive and slower VAX to run ULTRIX when you can get a
> much cheaper and faster RISC system to do the same thing.
The RISC computer architecture runs well in a stand-alone environment,
but does not always perform as well in a network environment due to the
lack of such nicities as MOVB instructions, and other such things which
make the VAX a superior computing architecture in many ways (at least when
it comes to copying files across a network, along with many other such
things that normally take place in a distributed computing environment).
The other advantage to a VAX architecture is that it is the only
[current] way to run VMS. Now you see ULTRIX, and VOILA! A simple
system disk swap, or what have you, and now you see VMS! Try them
potatoes on a PC or a RISC box!
-davo
|
| 1041.9 | Random musings | BOLT::MINOW | Gregor Samsa, please wake up | Thu Mar 08 1990 21:26 | 55 |
| re: .8:
or what have you,
That's a neat trick, Davo. Can you do it without waving your hands about?
Let's see now: disk swaps now require screw drivers and service tech's,
there's a little matter of licenses, and a big matter of trying to convince
the folk who run these systems (whether they're engineers or MIS folk)
to absorb another five foot shelf of arcane knowledge.
It might be fun to put a "typical user" up in the human factors lab and
videotape him/her installing *ANY* of our operating systems starting from
cardboard boxes.
Then give that person a Macintosh.
It was lots of fun being a wizard for the last 20 years: you could take
your girl friend into the computer lab and show her how you check the
oil on the 7090's core memory. You could dazzle customers with the
speed you entered the PDP-11 paper tape bootstrap 12701 177560 (etc: I bet
I can still do it from memory). You could navigate the tunnel in moonlander.
You could boot unix from a magtape because you knew the magic number never
written down but told, from wizard to wizard's apprentice, in a direct path
from ken thompson to you. You knew how many double-quotes to enter in DCL.
Now it's just a tool. You program in excel. You don't write hundreds of
lines of Fortran to draw a line: you just drag the mouse around and it
just happens.
If I was a customer, I wouldn't care one bit whether the computer has
a MOVB:
I JUST WANT TO GET MY INVOICES OUT ON TIME.
That isn't a vax, or a mips or a vms or a ultrix or anything else -- it's
a tool to do invoices.
Davo (and anyone else whose still listening): the folk out there are trying
to get useful work done. They want 39 cent ball-point pens, not carefully
made gold plated fountain pens. Those of us who made this revolution happen
are the monks of the middle ages, wearing our eyes out to illuminate one
magnificant sheet of parchment. The RK05 bootstrap was five instructions;
the RF30 is about 4000 lines of C. They both do the same thing.
I'm not sure where this note started any more; and I don't know where
it's going. I think our customer is becoming the video-store chain with
a VMS system (networked) in each franchise. The folk who run those stores
want to turn the system on and leave it on. They want systems that are
"forgiving" so they don't discover that six months of daily backups are
useless because the tape drive was broken.
Sorry. Just ran out of things to say. Excuse the incoherence. If there's
anything useful in there, please apply it before it's too late.
Martin.
|
| 1041.10 | from one midnight rambler to another... | OLDTMR::DMCLURE | Doing the DECwrite thing | Thu Mar 08 1990 23:34 | 136 |
| re: .9,
> Let's see now: disk swaps now require screw drivers and service tech's,
> there's a little matter of licenses, and a big matter of trying to convince
> the folk who run these systems (whether they're engineers or MIS folk)
> to absorb another five foot shelf of arcane knowledge.
Licences schmisenses! They'll buy what they need to buy to get
the job done. If they could use the capabilities of VMS in one case,
and ULTRIX in another, then chances are, they wouldn't want to limit
themselves by going non-VAX if they didn't have to. It would be an
advantage to buy a VAX since you wouldn't be limited to ULTRIX alone.
As for disk swaps, that's a piece of cake on most smaller VAXen,
almost as easy as a PC, yet maybe not as recommended. Heck, if they
had enough disk drives, they wouldn't have to worry about that anyway,
they could just boot off of a different source disk (perhaps even as
a client to either an LAVC, NFS, or even ELN system). Remember, we'd
be selling systems for an entire digital network sale right? Most of
the bigger corporate sales would be anyway. At any rate, the flexibility
of the VAX would seem to win out in any mid-to-large-scale networking
environment, whereas the non-VAX is probably superior in the strictly
stand-alone environment. It could also be simply an add-on sale to an
existing networking environment which is already at least partly filled
with VAXen - in which case buying more VAXen would seem like a smarter
option.
> It might be fun to put a "typical user" up in the human factors lab and
> videotape him/her installing *ANY* of our operating systems starting from
> cardboard boxes.
You sadist! ;^)
> Then give that person a Macintosh.
Ugh! There goes the pay-raise again!
> It was lots of fun being a wizard for the last 20 years: you could take
> your girl friend into the computer lab and show her how you check the
> oil on the 7090's core memory.
You devil! }:)
> You could dazzle customers with the
> speed you entered the PDP-11 paper tape bootstrap 12701 177560 (etc: I bet
> I can still do it from memory).
Ok, ok, I'm impressed already! I get the point though, the days
of the mystical computer room are coming to an end. The trick is to
design the computer room of the future and make sure it involves high-
yeild DEC products! The computer room of the future will have to be
girlfriend-friendly (girlfriendly? 8~)
> You could navigate the tunnel in moonlander.
I've played the game, but I don't remember any tunnels?
> You could boot unix from a magtape because you knew the magic number never
> written down but told, from wizard to wizard's apprentice, in a direct path
> from ken thompson to you.
You should write a book about it (and sell it on the info-market ;^).
> You knew how many double-quotes to enter in DCL.
$ write sys$output "YEAH""SO WHAT""::WHO[CARES]"
> Now it's just a tool. You program in excel. You don't write hundreds of
> lines of Fortran to draw a line: you just drag the mouse around and it
> just happens.
Speak for yourself. Not everyone has been tamed yet! Postscript
output is still fun to tweak.
> If I was a customer, I wouldn't care one bit whether the computer has
> a MOVB:
If you hate to wait for those extra network packets to transmit
during network copy operations on non-VMS systems you might.
> I JUST WANT TO GET MY INVOICES OUT ON TIME.
>
> That isn't a vax, or a mips or a vms or a ultrix or anything else -- it's
> a tool to do invoices.
Ok, so sell a VAX as a machine with multiple different types of
tools in one then.
> Davo (and anyone else whose still listening): the folk out there are trying
> to get useful work done.
..yeah, just like we are...
> They want 39 cent ball-point pens, not carefully made gold plated fountain
> pens.
I prefer the electronic medium myself. I hate paper - it's too
temporary.
> Those of us who made this revolution happen
> are the monks of the middle ages, wearing our eyes out to illuminate one
> magnificant sheet of parchment.
Yeah, a regular barrel of monks! Actually, I do like this line!
This line contains the very reason I replied to this note, it's not
too often that you see prose like that in the notesfiles...
> The RK05 bootstrap was five instructions;
> the RF30 is about 4000 lines of C. They both do the same thing.
Sounds like it may be reflective of the way we do business too:
bureaucratic bloat and unnecessary process.
> I'm not sure where this note started any more; and I don't know where
> it's going. I think our customer is becoming the video-store chain with
> a VMS system (networked) in each franchise.
Yeah, maybe so...we should definately be thinking about the future
of videos too! Guess what you'll be able to see on future systems?
> The folk who run those stores
> want to turn the system on and leave it on. They want systems that are
> "forgiving" so they don't discover that six months of daily backups are
> useless because the tape drive was broken.
Sounds like a need for an AI software solution if I've ever seen one.
> Sorry. Just ran out of things to say. Excuse the incoherence. If there's
> anything useful in there, please apply it before it's too late.
Yeah, yeah yeah...anyway...I'm dialed-in direct from home for
big bucks here, interesting stuff. Maybe if we could access this
file during working hours, we could discuss some of this during the
day too...oh well...
-davo
|
| 1041.11 | | SAUTER::SAUTER | John Sauter | Fri Mar 09 1990 07:53 | 16 |
| re: .9, .10---Martin, you're showing your age. It was more than 25
years ago that IBM replaced the oil-cooled memories in the 7090.
(For the younger readers of this topic: the IBM 7090 was a contemporary
of the DEC PDP-1, 1959 to 1964. It was an updated IBM 709, built using
technology derived from the IBM 7030 (stretch). The 709 was a tube
machine, and the scuttlebut was that the name 7090 was a pun on 709-T,
meaning 709 with Transistors.)
I believe that the PC running MS-DOS in 640 K of memory with 5 1/4-inch
floppy drives has become a commodity. The version with 3 1/2-inch
720K drives is also a commodity, since competition is based on product
quality and price, with brand name secondary, and innovation hardly
considered. Nevertheless, there is still a large market for machines
with greater capability, and that market isn't a commodity market, yet.
John Sauter
|
| 1041.12 | JUST REMINISCING | CSC32::YOUNG | | Fri Mar 09 1990 11:00 | 10 |
|
Re.11
You young spunk! Have you ever spent a night shift, going around
the computer room, opening cabinet doors, and checking for BLUE tubes,
and replacing THEM. Or tried to find the Mercury filled Relay (Gold)
which was frozen? Or taken a bank of memory, turned it upside down,
tapped it on the console, to bring the donuts back into place, and then
re-inserted it into the system, where it then ran like a champion?
George
|
| 1041.13 | Pterodactyl in >1 ways | VMSDEV::HALLYB | The Smart Money was on Goliath | Sat Mar 10 1990 08:33 | 1 |
| Re: .9 Spoken fine. "Pearls before swine" comes to mine...
|
| 1041.14 | | BOLT::MINOW | Gregor Samsa, please wake up | Sat Mar 10 1990 09:32 | 38 |
| George, I go back to Illiac-I. I was an undergraduate speech/theatre
major planning to go into speech science (or maybe stage technology)
who took a programming course in the summer of 1962 "just in case I
had to get a real job someday." (Talked to Marvin Levin last week,
and we traded mnenomics for Illiac's Hex notation, KSNJFL -- he knew
the clean ones, and I knew the dirty ones, but he amazed me by informing
me that it was the Polish (?) word for horse-manure.)
And, yes, the 7090 was once the 709-T -- and they were 99% program-
compatible (the 7094 added some indexing capabilities) and I have lots
of source code kicking around the attic, just in case it makes a comeback.
There are a lot of us old pharts around who wired plugboards on a 407
during high-school summers. When I was a RSTS specialist in the early
1970's, I would run into 15-year old kids who had been programming RSTS
for five years.
But don't worry, 25 years from now, you'll be amazing the little kiddies
with stories of how you actually typed on a keyboard to enter data, and
the display screen only had 60 lines of text and couldn't even display Kanji.
...
Perhaps the most important reason for the existance of the Digital notesfile
(and several others) is that it will capture an historical record of the
changes that have taken place in the last few years.
I really wish Dec had hired a journalist/historian to follow some of our
projects so we could look back ten years and understand how we made the
decisions that turned out right, and why we made some that were wrong.
Until then, we'll have to survive with late-evening and Saturday morning notes.
Martin.
ps: I always thought that "pearls before swine" was a job description for
a college English literature teacher.
|
| 1041.15 | | VMSDEV::HALLYB | The Smart Money was on Goliath | Tue Mar 13 1990 19:49 | 14 |
| > I really wish Dec had hired a journalist/historian to follow some of our
> projects so we could look back ten years and understand how we made the
> decisions that turned out right, and why we made some that were wrong.
Artists, too. We have lots of (OK, many) photos, but the trained eye
of the artist is better able to capture the soul of a company.
We just went thru another re-org today. If only there were a sketch
artist to record some of the expressions on the faces of the younger
folk who had never been thru this sort of thing before...
> ps: I always thought that "pearls before swine" was a job description for
> a college English literature teacher.
O Captain! My Captain!
|
| 1041.16 | | STKHLM::RYDEN | CEO, Dept of Odd Ends | Wed Mar 14 1990 03:38 | 25 |
|
<<< Note 1041.14 by BOLT::MINOW "Gregor Samsa, please wake up" >>>
>>I really wish Dec had hired a journalist/historian to follow some of our
>>projects so we could look back ten years and understand how we made the
>>decisions that turned out right, and why we made some that were wrong.
Hej Martin,
In fact there is a very interesting book that follows a project in the
manner you describe. It's title is XSEL's Progress: The Continuing
Journey of an Expert System, and is written by Enid Mumford and W.
Bruce MacDonald (the latter was the project leader at Digital). It is a
very readable and sometimes thrilling account of the planning and
implementation, the mistakes, stumbling blocks and problems meeting the
people involved in this extremely complicated, and, in the end,
extremely successful project. I really *do* recommend it.
Published by John Wiley & Sons 1989. ISBN 0 471 92322 2
Bo
XSEL
|
| 1041.17 | | SAUTER::SAUTER | John Sauter | Mon Mar 19 1990 08:10 | 7 |
| re: .12, .14---I defer to George and Martin, who are clearly my
seniors. I don't go back as far as tube computers myself, though
I did spend a couple of hours programming a Bendix G-15. Before
you guys get to feeling too superior, though, remember that the
senior living computer programmer is a Digital employee: Grace
Murray Hopper programmed the Mark I, a relay computer.
John Sauter
|
| 1041.18 | More than one Mark I | SSDEVO::HUGHES | Doin' the Shift-Click Drag .... | Mon Mar 19 1990 17:56 | 12 |
| re .17:
> remember that the
> senior living computer programmer is a Digital employee: Grace
> Murray Hopper programmed the Mark I, a relay computer.
> John Sauter
I believe you mean the _Harvard_ Mark I, John. In the late 40's amd
early 50's there also were the Manchester University Mk I and MK I*,
which were tube + magnetic drum computers.
Jim_(_who_programmed_the_non_Harvard_Mk_Is)
|
| 1041.19 | caught again | SAUTER::SAUTER | John Sauter | Tue Mar 20 1990 10:39 | 2 |
| re: .18---I bow to Jim's superior experience.
John Sauter
|
| 1041.20 | From hard-wired to hard-coded! | CADSYS::BAY | CNF ENTP PP | Thu Mar 22 1990 15:19 | 13 |
| Speaking of Grace Hopper,...
I weathered the transition from RT to RSX to VMS (along with a little
NOS/BE and MVS thrown in for spice, and SOS and MS-DOS for fun).
As I get more settled in my ways, I'm thinking less and less of making
the big move to U*ix.
I CAN *NOT* imagine what it must be like to have seen computers go from
mecanical to RISC VLSI! Incredible! Talk about transition!
Jim
|
| 1041.21 | Time passes | CADSE::CONLIFFE | Cthulhu Barata Nikto | Thu Mar 22 1990 21:44 | 10 |
| Continuing the rathole for a moment: I bought the (?auto?)biography
of Claude Pepper just for one page.
In the centre of the book were two photos, one on top of the other.
The top photo was a picture of the Wright Bothers airplane, with a
note on the front to Claude from Wilbur and Orville.
The bottom photo was a picture of Claude with the Apollo 11 astronauts!
Think about it
Nigel
|
| 1041.22 | Life is tough enough | DEMOAX::BRAVER | Gary Braver | Fri Mar 23 1990 12:50 | 14 |
| Back to the original topic:
The Vax is only a commodity if we let it be called a commodity.
There is no uniform definition of "commodity". Is Charmin toilet
paper a commodity? Crest toothpaste? Sony TV's? You can make
the case any way you want. Please lets not choose to call it a
commodity - life in the field is tough enough.
One other point that irks me - I often hear talk about VAX being near
end of life. How come I never hear about the IBM 360 architecture, which
was first introduced in 1963, approaching end of life?
Gary Braver
|
| 1041.23 | but we didn't have Notes back then to record it! | XANADU::FLEISCHER | without vision the people perish (381-0899 ZKO3-2/T63) | Fri Mar 23 1990 15:52 | 10 |
| re Note 1041.22 by DEMOAX::BRAVER:
> One other point that irks me - I often hear talk about VAX being near
> end of life. How come I never hear about the IBM 360 architecture, which
> was first introduced in 1963, approaching end of life?
Oh, for those of us who were at DEC back then, I think we
wrote off the IBM 360 architecture about 1978 or so. :-)
Bob
|
| 1041.24 | Its all in how you see it | LABC::MCCLUSKY | | Fri Mar 23 1990 19:38 | 4 |
| re Note 1041.22:
IBM is a MARKETING organization, that also produces computing products.
Could we learn something there?
Daryl
|
| 1041.25 | IBM is not a marketing organization | DEMOAX::BRAVER | Gary Braver | Mon Mar 26 1990 11:19 | 30 |
| Having worked for IBM in the late 70's I honestly believe that IBM's
prime goal was to win business. This goal pervaded all functions of
the company. Pursuit of this goal was severely dampened by managements
fear of compromising their antitrust defense. Incompatible product
lines: the S/34, 36, 38, AS/400 and the 360/370 line were the direct
results of these antitrust fears (two product lines with separate sales
forces would more easily allow the company to spin off the small
systems division).
While IBM prides itself in being an effective marketing organization,
the prime strategy IBM used to win business (at least when I worked
there) was to SELL SUCCESS. IBM would approach the MIS manager
and say something to the effect that you go with us and we'll guarantee
your success. If that failed they go to the MIS managers boss or
higher level executive and work it from that angle. Product was
secondary as long as it could reliably do the job.
I believe that IBM's strategy over the last 10 years has changed
as a direct result of our success. Traditionally we in Digital
have not sold success but rather product. We have gotten to where
we are today in part by having superior products (I also believe
a key element in our success has been our values/integrity). IBM
realized this during the mid 80's and set out to build product which
was competitive with us. They are now building more functional
products. So I would now say: IBM IS A COMPANY WHICH WILL DO WHAT IT
NEEDS TO DO TO SUCCEED. Don't undersell them by calling them a
marketing organization.
Regards, and appologies for any lecturing.
|
| 1041.26 | Good definition of marketing in the large | COUNT0::WELSH | Think it through | Wed Dec 09 1992 05:58 | 25 |
| re .25:
> So I would now say: IBM IS A COMPANY WHICH WILL DO WHAT IT
> NEEDS TO DO TO SUCCEED. Don't undersell them by calling them a
> marketing organization.
Gary, many thanks for summing up what I, for one, really
mean by "a marketing organization":
"A COMPANY WHICH WILL DO WHAT IT NEEDS TO DO TO SUCCEED."
In other words, looking at the markets it might address, its
own strengths and assets, it competition, and then analyzing
what market niches it can best exploit: designing and developing
products and services to address those niches, and FINALLY
rolling out and selling those products and services. (For a
superb example of how all this gets done, see "The Silverlake
Project" - significantly, IBM at its best).
As opposed to what some people in Digital think a marketing
organization is - one that does what it has to to ram whatever
it happens to have produced down customers' throats. Unfortunately,
some of those people's job titles are "Marketing Manager".
/Tom
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