Conference 7.286::digital

    Jon,
    
    I agree with alot of what you are saying.  However, I think you
    are putting too many of our eggs in the PC basket.  PC's are 
    going strong right now.  But don't rule out the dumb VT "terminal".
    
    Why would you want a $1,000. PC sitting on an airline ticket counter
    when a 2 or 3 hundred dollar "dumb terminal" does everything that is
    needed for the task? or at a parts store, or pharmacy, or.....
    
    The terminals group also has printers.  How many PC's have a printer
    attached to them?
    
    We need to supply the customer with what they need to do the task
    they are chartered to do.  If a dumb terminal will do the job (for
    2 or 3 hundred dollars), don't force a $1,000. PC on them, with a
    $40. (?) BMC vs 10 or 12 for a dumb terminal.
    
    	LISTEN TO WHAT THE "CUSTOMER" SAYS.
    
    
    My 2 � worth
    
    
    
    
    

We ought to invest in a mix of desktop devices that corresponds to what our
customers use daily. I've been doing my bit for my team - all new capital
purchases in the last 2 years have been Intel based PCs. If nothing else, it
helps keep everyone honest on our true added value with our non-PC hardware
and software.

Certainly no bs that you occassionally get from senior managers who obviously
have never touched a PC or a Mac...
								- Ian W.

    You blew it Jon! You didn't wish them a MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

    I agree about not trying to push a PC on someone that can use a dumb
    terminal just fine.  One of the advantages of having remote terminals
    is that you DON'T have to have all the software installed on every
    terminal in order for people to use it.  And, the cost per seat can be
    dramatically lower than having a PC per seat.
    
    As I understand it, Windows will eventually be able to run on even very
    tiny computers with Windows itself being available in ROM.  It seems
    obvious to me that Digital should eventually be able to market "dumb 
    terminals" that can run within a Windows NT client/server setup.  I would 
    be surprised if Digital and others don't already have such "dumb terminals"
    on the drawing boards.
    
    Steve

    Cabrinety's VIPS group makes money building things like those dumb
    terminals; last I heard VIPS comes in at nearly 20% profit over budget.
    re .0, when your Pathworks group clears its first dime, let us know.
    
    

    re .0
    
    What a horribly egocentric view of the world. The view that PC's are
    the only approach to computing sits right up there with the Unix is the 
    only operating system. The massive increases in computing power will
    soon mandate that we will need to change some of the basic paradigms of
    computing technology. A PC focus will not provide that. The current PC
    Marketplace is very much a case of what I call "lowest common
    denominator computing". It is bringing everyone to a base level of
    computing that can be understood by all, and does not go towards
    empowering the individual. People are becoming more and more "slaves"
    to their computers. The computers are not adding significant value, if
    anything they are making life more difficult. This needs to change.
    
    Now is the time that we should be putting some R&D dollars into some
    complete different approaches to computing technology. Not just being
    an "also-ran" in the PC commodity space.
    
    Q

>    an "also-ran" in the PC commodity space.
    
The PC industry now exceeds 50% of the total computer industry.
The PC industry is incredibly diverse, with hundreds of niches, and *many*
good-sized markets, e.g. motherboards, SVGA boards, disk drives, etc.

We're actually *good* at some of these things. We ought to do more of
what we're good at. For instance we've been very good at dumb terminals. Why
didn't we do *more* IBM-compatible dumb terminals. (This isn't a major
growing market anymore, sigh.)

To make money, forget the Grand Vision. It's just a matter of many little
profitable niche products: disk drives, dumb terminals, PCs, PCI SCSI boards,
LATs, OpenVMS, Alpha PC's, etc. Let's treat each one of these as a business.
If the business looks good, do more of it! If the business looks bleak, shut
it down!

Put the numbers in your spreadsheet, and tell us how much profit you plan to
make, and how much investment you need to do it. Place your bets, and roll
the dice. 

This is the venture capital model of the world. Can't we do this at DEC?

--RS

    Before we put on blinders and say DUMB TERMINALS are the best business,
    or that PC's are the best place to invest, lets look at the market, and
    what the customer is buying.

    Most customers are now buying PC's...  In order for a Dumb Terminal to
    work, they have to buy a system (hardware and software) that can
    support a dumb terminal EASILY.  Frankly, even though some DOS products
    can accept a second terminal, or network software, most first time
    users find it difficult to setup.  The alternative is to use a higher
    priced system.  Personally I don't see the trend to use equipment that
    is hard to configure, or expensive.

    I see the trend as standalone PC's.  This may not be what We as DIGITAL
    want, but it appears to be what the consumer wants.  Look in the
    COMPUTER SHOPPER, tell me how many dumb terminals are advertised each
    month.  A successful company will sell what the market wants...

    Jim Morton

    For heavy duty software development\documentations\graphic work
    and stuff like that, one needs many windows on the screen at the same 
    time, most PC's come with 14" or 15" screens, so you have to go and buy 
    at least 20" monitor like the ones we have on our workstations, a good 
    20" monitor is about $2,000 just for that. there is big business 
    in these kind of monitors such as NEC and stuff like that.

    i cant do much work on a 14" screen PC, I need big monitor, I need
    to run lots of stuff on different windows at the same time, i need
    to be able to cut/past from one window to another etc... I dont see
    how engineers can do the same work they do now on workstations and
    do it on 14" or 15" PC's ?

    i think i said enough for one night, i'll continue tomorrow.

    thank you,
    \bye
    \nasser



    

    We need to run this company on data, it sounds like we are heading
    this way.  

    I keep hearing that we don't make any money on Hardware.  This is
    crap.  Some of our hardware products cost very little to develop,
    have huge markups and sell quite well.  Others cost huge amounts
    to develop (>$1B), have low markups and don't sell well.  
    
    If you look at the average of all our HW products they clearly don't
    make any money.  If you look at a single family you will see that
    the make tons of incremental profit. 
    
    You can make money in ANY business if it is managed well. 
    
    We sell tons of terminals.  We should keep investing in that biz and
    watch it's P&L.  Any biz that's making money needs investment at
    some level.  If we have a profit we need to invest in new growth areas
    that aren't yet making a profit but have promise.  NT and RISC (Alpha) 
    processors are a good example.

    We need to to service our installed base, we can't afford to drive
    them away.  We shouldn't ever do the PDP-11 blunders from here on out.
    We stopped investing in PDP-11, turned out backs on our customers.
    It took several years before the revenue dropped below $1 Billion
    dollars!   If we did a single new chip design to replace the J11
    CPU around the time of the MicroVAX2 we could have kept many customers
    from migrating to other realtime systems.  They didn't go to VAX.

    If we invested 1% of the revenue from PDP-11's back into new CPU's
    we could have owned the OEM realtime space.   

    We're facing that today with Alpha.  I hear many people say that
    all our customers will just move over to Alpha, it won't be like
    PDP-11's.  They need to look at the simple fact that customers
    aren't able to even upgrade the version of VMS without breaking
    something.  Our engineering group refuses to upgrade our version
    in the middle of a project as it could (and has) set us back
    significantly in the past...   Imagine what a simple transition
    to a new architecture can cause!

    We need to keep investing (grated at a lower level) in VAX computers.
    It we are still selling $1B a year we still need to invest. People
    have to get off this latest and greatest bandwagon.  Watch all our
    eggs, not just the brightly colored ones.

    Enough rumblings.
    Jon

    Re .10,

    Jon,
    	I agree with your title "Invest at the right level EVERYWHERE!". 
    We should look at what is making a profit, and milk it for all its
    worth.  We should also see where our competition is making money, and
    do everything we can to win over that market.

    Jim Morton

    Re: .9: easy answer: you can buy as large (or larger) monitors for a PC
    as you can buy for a VAXstation. Cut and paste is the forte of the PC
    software industry. Try Corel Draw, MS-Word, Excel, etc. The CASE
    environments are better than ours, too, in many respects (with the
    exception of LSE, for which Digital still has an edge, I'm told...)
    
    Re: .5:
    
    1. PCSG, the software side, has been making money,
    during most of the quarters that Digital has been losing money. During
    our last quarter we made over our budget, and above most people's
    wildest upper predictions. We now have more than 12% of the world's PC
    connects going to PATHWORKS servers. That is because we are in a
    very successful niche market: we are one of only two of the world's
    manufacturers of high-capacity file servers (Digital and Banyan). We
    have some customers with nearly 1000 PCs connected to VAX 9000s.
    
    2. PATHWORKS has actually been extremely important to the VAX sales
    that are still taking place. If you look at most of these sales, you
    will find the words "file server" or "network operating system" or "PC
    interconnect" or flat-out "PATHWORKS" mentioned in the sale lit.
    
    3. It's very nice that we are still making money selling dumb
    terminals, but it was also very nice when we were still making money
    selling VAXes. In my opinion, IT WON'T LAST LONG when companies offer
    PC applications that will run rings around the current TP/dumb-terminal
    applications. Just wait a while...
    
    I'm not going to attempt to debate this fact: PCs are the major
    computing force, the major computing paradigm today. They have
    empowered end-users, millions of end-users, as no other computers or
    dumb terminals have ever done so in the past. That says nothing about
    the future, it is just a statement of fact about the present. Go visit
    any of our biggest VAX customers and you will find a PC on all the
    desks.
    
    If we are to take the lead, we need to excel in current technology and
    be the leading-edge vendor. Why aren't WE writing those PC transaction
    processing applications, and selling them, along with Digital PCs?
    Of course we can't, because it would get in the way of
    dumb terminal sales! Do you get my point?
    
    							Thanks
    							Jon
               

    Re: .1: on printers. Please refer to Computer shopper. There you'll
    find several *hundred brands* of printers, most under $1000, all PC
    compatible. HP sells *millions* of LaserJet printers each year. These
    are high-quality, postscript-compatible. Even color ones (slightly more
    expensive (:-)).
    
    What's more, Microsoft's recently-announced product, Windows for
    Workgroups ($69!!!) allows peer-to-peer and client/server sharing of
    files and printers, comes with all network and management software
    necessary to build a PC LAN.
    
    							Jon

    These are all strong points but I'd like to add another. Anyone
    espousing a style of computing should look long and hard at the user
    that style represents. It's easy to cite a particular reference account
    or a particular well-selling product and make decisions on offerings.
    
    Yes, most customers are buying many many PCs and the market has proved
    that it can shift computing styles very rapidly so we must be more on
    our toes than ever. To do so, we must leverage high level relationships
    with accounts that can describe *with conviction* what they'll be using
    and how. These must represent both customers and noncustomers, end
    users and ISVs, commercial organizations and others and all types of
    industries. This won't come from a statistical report but from an
    *understanding* of what users will be doing. We should then map this
    against our own technical capabilities.
    
    Too many decisions have been made based on the reference users we know
    or on too small a selection set. 
    
    L

>To make money, forget the Grand Vision. It's just a matter of many little
>profitable niche products: disk drives, dumb terminals, PCs, PCI SCSI boards,
>LATs, OpenVMS, Alpha PC's, etc. Let's treat each one of these as a business.

Follow this advice and you'll be an "also ran" the rest of your life. This
is the type of thinking fostered by a multitude of MBAs who have no view
beyond next year's bottom line.

We need to participate in existing markets to make enough money to stay
alive but we also need to invent new ways to use computers. The PC
revolution, as so many think of it, does not break new ground, it just
makes the existing ground cheaper to maintain.

We need to find new ways to make computers save customer's money. You can
do this by making existing jobs cheaper to do or by making presently
impossible jobs (or methodologies) possible. The former option is being
seriously contested by all players. The latter is, usually, only possible
by the IBMs, Digitals and AT&Ts of this world.

I sincerly hope the resolution of Digital' short-term problems does not
destroy it's knowledge that "leading edge" is really spelled "bleeding
edge." If it does, Digital will never even be a shadow of the company that
invented a lot what we call the computer industry.

Mickey.

re .8:

>    I see the trend as standalone PC's.  This may not be what We as DIGITAL
>    want, but it appears to be what the consumer wants.  Look in the
>    COMPUTER SHOPPER, tell me how many dumb terminals are advertised each
>    month.  A successful company will sell what the market wants...


Look in MacWorld, and see how many IBM clones are advertised.

    
    	Standalone PC's fit a niche... they are hardly the be-all and
    	end-all. Following existing trends at the expense of innovation and
    	risk-taking is probably only useful if you are a pacific rim
    	mega-manufacturer of generic equipment.
    	/john

>The above-mentioned article in PC World
>also had a long monolog by Larry Cabrinety about the value of dumb terminals
>for, of all things, word processing!!! This makes no sense to me. 
    
    I haven't seen the article, but are you sure he was talking about 
    dumb terminals (e.g. VT420) and not windowing terminals (e.g. VXT2000)?
    
    If he was talking about windowing terminals, does that still make
    no sense to you?
    
    
    

    
    re: .10 (Hi Jon!)
    
    I want to second what Jon says.  There is still money to be made
    in hardware.  There are people in this world driving Maseratis,
    vacationing on big yachts, and living in mansions because they
    figured out how to manufacture hardware efficiently and effectively.
    
    Once you figure out the *right* hardware to make, the right
    way to make it, and the right way to market it (see DELL) you can 
    still make money.  I worry about the trend in this country that 
    has companies rushing away from hardware to "value-added" 
    services; the competition in value-added services will become 
    even more brutal than that in hardware, because the barriers
    to entry are so low.  It doesn't take multiple-millions to be
    an effective computer consultant; it takes education, experience,
    and cheap tools. The output is primarily intellectual property.
    
    Glenn

re .0
    
> 1. We need to get our engineers in synchronization with what is happening
> in the Fortune-500 companies, that is, quickly get our engineers using the
> same hardware - namely PCs - as the end-users in these companies. This is a
> large investment, but well worth the cost if we expect our engineers to
> produce products that our customers want and need. Typical prices for
> adequate desktop PCs range around $1000 each, plus $500 for the network
> card.
    
    Would you like to see our next generation Alpha AXP chip and
    workstation families designed before the year 2000, or are you
    suggesting that we contract the work out to engineers who have adequate
    tools?
    
    Tony

    
    Somewhat still on the subject....
    
    This is more of a question....to those in-the-know.
    
    Yesterday I heard on the news that IBM stock is down to ~$48.  Pretty
    bad for them.  They are also planning on announcing a new (of all
    things), MAIN FRAME.  If PC's are where-it-is-at, how come IBM is
    coming out with a new main frame?  What do they know that we don't?
    Or is that why their stock is so low?
    
    Back to dumb terminals...the VT100 set the industry standard.  There
    were several companies who made VT100 look-a-likes, NOT IBM clones.
    The VT220 sales was OVER 1 million, also with many companies copying
    it.
    
    Enough on terminals, I think there is a market for both.  As I said
    before, we need to supply the customer with what they need to do their
    job.
    
    ART
     

    re: 20
    
    I was speaking of software. The software market today is nearly 100%
    PC software and MAC software, and that is what our customers are going
    to be interested in buying. What market would you write software for if
    you were in the software business, one whose market base is 1 million
    (VAXes) or one whose market base is 100 million (PCs)?
    
    With regard to hardware design, I am told that PCs now have some of the
    fanciest CAD/CAM tools on them. Again, it's a matter of market. It has
    nothing to do with reliability or robustness (MS-DOS is about the
    worst OS around, but who cares - it gets the job done, and Windows 3.1
    makes it almost tolerable...).
    
    PCs are also MUCH higher performers, for most software, than MOST of
    the VAXes we sell (quite a statement all by itself). A 386 33MHz,
    with a street price of about $1000 today, will outperform a VAX 6210
    running VMS at many CPU-intensive tasks. The same 386 33MHz machine
    running eXcursion will outperform a VAXstation 3100 running DECWindows.
    
    My point here is that we need to understand what we need to do to get
    customers again. That means out-selling, out-performing, and
    out-qualitying (a new word) our competition. We need to be
    fast, cheap, and excellent, because that is where the market is now.
    
    							Jon
                            

re .21

> They [IBM] are also planning on announcing a new (of all things), MAIN FRAME. 

Yes, sure, we've got one, too. AXP 10000.

>    Or is that why their stock is so low?

Their stock is low because they're losing a lot of money and their prospects
are bleak. (Does this sound familiar?)
    
>  There were several companies who made VT100 look-a-likes, NOT IBM clones.

There were (and are) several companies who make IBM terminal clones. The
IBM terminal market and ANSI terminal market are similar in size. IBM
dominates their market, we dominate the ANSI market.

--RS

    
    re: .22
    
    	You mention it's a matter of market not reliability or robustness.
    Although I believe we have entered the age of breadbox computing, these
    systems will have to be more robust and reliable for the many applications 
    that the lowly PC platform has taken on. Open any trade rag and you will 
    even see UPS and RAID for higher availability PCs. Anyone who has lost a 
    day or so worth of CAD work knows the importance of these attributes even 
    at the PC/worksystem level. Also, we will probably see PCs used as low level
    mainframes driving an ever expanded and downscaling hierarchy.
    	When I mention breadbox computing I mean 80% of our computing needs
    are met by distributed or standalone systems of that size. The other
    20% will still require data center systems, MPP, etc.
    
    - Jim K

    >What market would you write software for if
    >    you were in the software business, one whose market base is 1
    >million (VAXes) or one whose market base is 100 million (PCs)?
    
    I'd look at what people were willing to pay and see if i could make a
    profit at it.  (hint- people expect to pay less for PC software but
    demand the same level of support).
    
    and I'd look to see where those 100 million PC's are - cause i don't
    believe they're all here and would be paying customers.   
    
    Remember that most of the PC buyers are just buying expensive gameboys.
    And the overseas ones don't buy software, they copy it.  As do about
    75% in the US.  

    Re; .0
    
    I'd like to suggest that the Pathworks team put out a real VT emulator.
    
    The reason a lot of people stick with a VT is beacuse their
    applications use the full capabilities of it. Until you can give me
    REGIS, DCS etc on my DEC PC using a DEC written emulator as part of
    Pathworks you haven't a hope of getting me to part with my VT. 
    
    Happy solstice celebrations...

    re.26 Have you looked at Reflection 4? It's the best VT340 emulator
    that I've seen. A large customer of ours uses it extensively, and is
    very happy with it. Granted, it's 'Not Invented Here', but it is
    available, and gets the job done.
    
    Terminals? My old VT100 and VT330 are both sitting idle in the next
    room, while I enter this message from a 40mhz 386, running Reflection
    4, dialed into the modem pool in Houston, which connects me to the
    cluster in Dallas. I find this little box much more useful than any of
    the VAX apps I ever used. 
    
    Harry
    

re   <<< Note 2289.25 by SOLVIT::ALLEN_R >>>

>    I'd look at what people were willing to pay and see if i could make a
>    profit at it.  (hint- people expect to pay less for PC software but
>    demand the same level of support).

There are an awful lot of profitable PC software companies, and I don't see 
many softwar houses aiming at workstations that don't already have SW 
there.  People expect to pay the same price (or darn close) for their 
software no matter where it runs.
    
>    and I'd look to see where those 100 million PC's are - cause i don't
>    believe they're all here and would be paying customers.   
 
Who cares if they pay with lira, yen, DM, pounds or dollars?
   
>    Remember that most of the PC buyers are just buying expensive gameboys.
>    And the overseas ones don't buy software, they copy it.  As do about
>    75% in the US.  

I think your data is a year out of date.  The SIA has estimated the license 
compliance rate has grown immensely in the past several quarters.  I 
personally think this is due to:
a) prices coming down so rapidly
b) better and more public enforcement
c) packaging that makes sense
d) sophistication growing in the user community

I think your comments are rather ethnocentric.  I would love to see any 
recent data that backs up your numbers.  

I strongly believe you are also showing a rather distinct lack of PC market
understanding when you claim PC buyers are gameboy buyers.  Have you yet
"played" with Virtual Basic, ViewSim, or any C++ tools on a PC?  Have you
compared a 50MHz 486 with 32 MB of memory, a CDROM player and a 1K by 1K
monitor to anything we offer? We do many things better, and the PC does
many things better.  The PC costs <$2000 when you buy an inkjet printer
with it.  We don't do prices batter. 

Matt

"Pathworks" may be making money, but it has killed us in the past with some
serious screw ups. It doesn't take many Mintz Levin-type disasters to wipe out
_ALL_ that profit for the whole year.

Sell lots of products, but PLEASE make sure it's a GOOD product when it goes out
the door, not 4-5 patch kits later. Also, please make sure that sales has the 
right info on how to sell it correctly the first time.

Bryan

    If I buy a terminal (VT or X) I have a terminal.
    
    If I buy a PC with a terminal emulator, I have a terminal AND the most
    popular computer in the world that can run virtually any application I
    want on its own.
    
    I have some kind of VT sitting in a box down here in my basement.  The
    power up self test takes longer than my PC does to boot.  It's out on a
    property pass from DEC yet I'm using a PC I bought with my own money.
    
    Maybe it's me, but the future is pretty clear.
    
    -joet

    Harry (.26)
    
    Yep, I can buy a third party emulator, but why the heck should I need
    to! Remember, if these PC things ever take off within the company (:-)),
    there will need to be potentially 1000's of licences. Every one of
    those that ends up at a 3rd party is real money out of this company.

    
    re a couple back ...
    
    Some (one?) companies seem to make mega-billions shipping buggy products,
    & the public come back for more  -- again & again. What voodoo magic do
    they have that we haven't? 
    
    Does young Bill make a conscious decision to go with 95% complete
    products, or is life just like that .... One thing for sure, he doesn't
    share the stated DEC desire for something to be guaranteed perfect 
    before shipping ... but then neither do we, judging by the QAR's that 
    fly around :-)
    
    Those that do not follow this thread were probably not users of Windows
    2.0, 3.0, DOS 4, DOS 5 CHKDSK etc
    
    
    Colin

    As someone who has a great deal of respect for Digital, its people,
    products and ethics, may I add my two pence worth (about 3 cents).
    
    I remember in 1968 when IBM ruled the world discovering that for "ONLY"
    �25000 (about $60,000 then) you could get a gizmo called a PDP8 which
    would act as an intelligent router, switch etc. and was also as
    powerful as many small computers (i.e. mainframes).  The company that
    made that product has changed the face of computing, bringing computer
    power to the users in a way IBM, NCR, Honeywell, CDC, Burroughs, Univac
    could not.  It took the machine away from a centralised computer room
    and made it a tool that everyone could use.  IBM had to follow.
    
    Fifteen years ago micros were techie products; now they have grownup. 
    If Digital continues the sterile argument about whether PCs are for
    real it will go the way of Unisys (=Univac + Burroughs), Wang etc.  If
    you adapt and bring your engineering skills to shaping the market
    nobody will touch you.
    
    As someone who knows and has worked for a large number od DEC customers
    over the years, they are increasingly relying on networks of desktop
    PCs, often as cheap as the monochrome dumb terminals they replace, to
    act both as local processing power for routine tasks(WP, spreadsheets
    etc.) and as gateways into VAXes acting as servers and thence to
    mainframes running corporate systems.  The mainframes are expensive
    and downsizing is happening.  So are the VAXes by comparison to the
    PCs.  The software applications on each are becoming more focussed to
    the platform's capabilities; not one client I know uses WPS as their
    word processing tool for business letters any more : the PC products
    are so much better.  Equally, I don't yet know anyone who uses the PCs
    themselves for corporate accounts, warehouse management etc.  Note the
    word yet.
    
    To dismiss PCs as games machines is trivialising the argument.  Just
    because they can run games does not meean that's their only use. - You
    would be surprised to see how many VAXes are used after 6:00 p.m. to
    run games - often far more challenging ones, I'm told, than the "shoot
    them down" PC games since they allow many participants.[I find most
    computer games boring].
    
    The danger to DEC in this is that the user's perception of computing
    has changed.  If the PC and the network software / hardware are
    produced in Taiwan the user perceives the entire system as such.  Until
    Digital produces, markets and supports these products with the same
    enthusiasm as it produces the minis and terminals the customer will go
    elsewhere.  DEC customers are extremely loyal, often in the face of
    obstacles.  Until DEC salesmen can relate to customers' requirements in
    this field with their own experience (how many have a PC on their desk? 
    How many carry a DEC portable?) the customer will ring DELL or Mr.Clone
    first.  Pricing also needs to be addressed. Why should I or anyone else
    pay 50% more for an industry standard product?  Digital's buying power,
    internalional manufacturing and distribution and quality should give
    you the edge over anyone.  
    
    With very best wishes for a prosperous new year for all.
    
    Tony Moon 

    re: Colin and buggy software.

    I've attended a computer security course few years ago taught by a non
    DEC consultant a "director of research" of his own ( I suspect one man)
    company. We got a very well written, professional course book. The teacher
    complained a lot about MS Windows ( v3 ?) and his MS Word package. The
    software crashed all the time, he had to wake up every two hours last
    night before the course to restart the thing etc. 

    But the book got printed and was of a very high quality.

    What were his alternatives for producing it ? Spent lot more money on
    systems or professional help. So, price performance of this buggy
    software was simply unbeatable. What's more, the author had total
    control over the layout and could change it anytime, unbeatable
    flexibility.  I doubt if he could afford any outside help so his
    whole business would not exist without the buggy lousy and insecure
    system ( the book he printed was about PC viruses).

    	re: few other.

    It is amazing to encounter such fantastic PC ignorance ( re: Qou...)
    at DEC year 1992. Digital has slept through a real revolution in the
    computer market, not evolution or price/performance cuts, but a true
    paradigm shift. This is lamentably trivial to state.

    Many common notions got redefined :

    	Computer	( we only now start making some)
    	network		( from being words best we have 6-7% of the market)
    	applications	( means now productivity or application generators
    			like EXCELL etc)
    	user training	( you will get a video tape and on line training)
    	documentation	( MS Word/EXCELL books are much better then ours)
    	user interface
    	ease of use
    	ease of installation
    	integration with other products /compatibility with competitive
    	data format

    	 ...and productivity.
    	The last point is often laugh at internally at DEC, especially by
    	engineers. The reason is that  we don't use computers the way
    	other people do. PC software today allows users to get from "raw
    	data to results", without intermediary of programmers, consultants,
    	"management science department" and other expensive specialists. 

    	It is enough to imagine being one man consulting company to
    	understand advantages of getting results at low overhead.
    	
    	PCs are sold to do real work and not games, many business critical 
    	and mission critical ( but rather with Unix and OS/2 then DOS)
    	are run on PCs. Actually, PC mission critical systems has paid 
    	my salary last 2 years.

    			wlodek	

    .28 et al
    
    I have been around PCs a long time.  I wasn't shooting them down or say
    that a market isn't there.
    
    On the other hand I've been around long enough to know a few things,
    one being that they are not the savior of mankind and will replace
    every need there is out in the world, and two that people that tell me
    the market is SO big usually don't know what they are taking about. 
    I sat in a room in '83 with a bunch of people while marketing managers
    told us the PC market for DEC was a 8 billion dollar potential, when
    the company was only doing about that.  
    
    The software compliance rate may have come up, you are right I have
    been out of my compliance job now for a few years, but I strongly doubt
    it has changed much in places like Korea, Taiwan, Japan, et al. since I
    just recently heard that the talks with those types of countrys have
    gotten no where.  Compliance used to be around 25% in the PC space.
    Much of the increase has come about due to developers cracking down on
    non-compliance and users finding out that support is sometimes more
    important than just having binaries to run.
    
    Again, while the market for PC and related SW is growing and worth
    investment in it is a raving engineer (with little experiance in the
    real world) who thinks that it is the savior of mankind.
    
    BTW, in my present job I quote a lot of PC related products.  Just this
    week I worked on a UL544 PC quote.  And since a lot of what I do is
    image related I find that more often than not we are working with or
    quoting PCs.  So don't get the idea I am against PCs.  But on the other
    hand I've run across more than one customer who would rather not have
    the expence of a PC in terms of performance and/or management and
    prefers a windows terminal or a workstation.  
    
    rich
    who still doesn't have a *need* for a PC at home.

    rate-hole about PC editors etc.. follows:

    AMIpro is supposed to be one of the best editors for PC, I got the 
    latest v3.0 and it crashed on me like 5 times and in different places 
    during one long session of use. check out LaTeX for real word processing 
    and making books, beats MS word and AMIpro hands down. IMNSHO. LaTeX
    runs on VMS and almost any other platform. including PC's too.


    \bye

    \nasser

There is reliable software.  There is Windows software.  .36 and .35
illustrate a PC conundrum:  The two are different categories.

I wrote an entire book (ISDN In Perspective) using MS-Word V4.0 on a PC.
It essentially never crashed.  MS-Word V5.0 has better features, and
will do lots of neat "desktop publishing".  And it's reliable, and even
runs as a non-PM native OS/2 application, same image.  But it's not a
Windows application.  Word for Windows and Ami Pro both depend on
Windows.

Part of the maturing process for PCs is to know what counts: Pretty
screens (Windows) or reliability (non-Windows).

In a non-Windows environment, I found that things like text editing,
compiling, searching throught masses of files (Dieter Heinzer's
SEARCHT), etc. were much faster under DOS on a PC than on a VAX with
terminals or DECterms.  It's a more productive environment, IF you know
the tricks and which software to use when.

    
    Not to rathole any further, but I'm a little surprised to hear all
    these stories of Windows' lack of stability.  My generic 386/33 has
    been running Windows 3.0/3.1 for two years, and I think it's hung maybe
    once or twice, and it gets used many hours per day.  My wife has typed
    over 350 documents (6 million characters) into Word for Windows and has
    never had a single crash.
    
    Compare this to DECWrite and DECDecision Calc, which will absolutely
    hang every five minutes on our VAX cluster.  I've had such rotten luck
    with our workstation software that I absolutely refuse to use it
    anymore.  Other than UniGraphics (high-end mechanical CAD software), my
    VaxStation 3100 is used mainly to hold down my desk.
    
    Ed
      
    
    
    
    

    Sorry for the potential rathole but...
    
    re .29
    Could someone please tell me (here or by mail) what the Mintz Levin
    disaster was?
    
    roland

re:.38
Word for Windows and Excel are written in-house by Microsoft.  They
have access to all of the secret entry points, bug reports, etc.,
for Windows.  Any other developer has a harder time of it.  If all
you ever run is Microsoft-developed code, you're bound to have an
easier time of it.  The FTC is looking into this, I hear....

On the other hand, an article in the New York Times magazine a few weeks
ago (or was it the Boston Globe?) by a WinWord user reveals that even
that program is often unstable.  I suppose it depends how you use it.
I stick to Word for DOS.  I do find DECwrite for VMS to be fairly 
stable, albeit not quite perfect.

re. .2? and .33

Kinda reminds me of how the japanese made their way into our consumer 
hearts.

Those early sub-compact, compact cars that got better and better as the
years went by.  Eventually, building on being relatively inexpensive and
durable, people preferred them to american cars.

Now, those sub-compacts and compacts have become full-sized and even
luxury cars.  The quality and reputation still intact.

Same with tv's, consumer stereo's (read non high-end, mass-market), and
other goodies ....

So goes the shift in PC's.  First, being scrawny little things.  Now,
they're faster, run a multitude of quality software and are relatively 
inexpensive.  People buy them up (companies and households) to do their 
work and see these new players as being a standard 'status-quo'.

Who knows.  You may find DELL or APPLE or any other (large) PC company come 
out with a larger, more powerful PC (with newer and more powerful INTEL 
chips) that many will say have 'minicomputer' characteristics.

A foot inside our door ....

re Note 2289.15 by ELWOOD::LANE:

> The PC
> revolution, as so many think of it, does not break new ground, it just
> makes the existing ground cheaper to maintain.

        No -- you completely misunderstand the PC revolution if you
        simply think that PCs are popular because they are a cheaper,
        more affordable way to compute.

        That would be as silly as to suggest that automobiles are
        more popular than public transportation because they are
        cheaper or more affordable than trains.

        It has turned out to be far more fundamental.  In some ways
        it may even be irrational.  But would you rather be selling
        to a small but very rational market or to a large market
        suffering from a touch of insanity?

        There is still a great deal of room for innovation in both
        technology and application in the personal space.  One of the
        risks facing Digital, in my opinion, is that we won't be able
        to justify and fund as much innovation and "bleeding edge"
        development if we shrink away from where most of the market
        is.  Think of the big system integration companies (e.g.,
        Anderson, EDS).  Sure, they build good systems that meet very
        ambitious requirements.  But they are not known as the
        industry's source of technical innovation.  Custom projects
        do not support that.  Potential volume supports that.  We
        must be in the volume markets.

        (And do not suppose that being in the volume markets means
        that we must be a commodity vendor.  With a few notable
        exceptions many successful players in the PC market sell
        innovative and highly distinguished products.  Being in the
        volume market means that they have a large potential audience
        to which to sell;  if they are good enough, they can grow
        quite large and fast.  If you are not in the volume markets,
        you can't.  Period.  No matter how good you are.)

        Bob

re .-1

I'll stand by my prior comments.

I'll also add, in reference to:

>is.  Think of the big system integration companies (e.g.,
>Anderson, EDS).  Sure, they build good systems that meet very
>ambitious requirements.  But they are not known as the
>industry's source of technical innovation.  Custom projects
>do not support that.  Potential volume supports that.  We
>must be in the volume markets.

Why would you expect a "big system integration company" to be a
source of technical innovation?  That's not what they do.

I'll also argue with your concept of innovation.

In the first place, anything can be innovation. I was referring to advancing
the state of computer science, not building a faster widget.

Serious technical innovation usually comes from custom, one of a kind
efforts (or raw research, something very few do.)  It often comes from
military projects. I'm not talking about a faster disk drive or a bigger
processor or a smaller box; I'm talking of breaking new ground. If you
have any smarts at all, you don't do that in the mass marketplace. How
could you afford it? Who'd buy it?

Does the Alpha chip advance the state of computer science? By it's self,
no. When you use it to do something that's never been possible before, yes.
Was it built for the mass market to make money? Yes and I hope it does
very well. Will the advancement of computer science that occurs as a result
of Alpha's speed occur in the mass market? Probably not.

PCs are cheaper and more convenient that the bigger systems, sometimes
faster and sometimes easier to use but they don't add anything to the
pool of computer science.

Mickey.

re Note 2289.43 by ELWOOD::LANE:

> If you
> have any smarts at all, you don't do that in the mass marketplace. How
> could you afford it? Who'd buy it?

        I think that that is part of the fundamental change. What you
        say above MAY have been true before -- it will be
        increasingly less true.

> PCs are cheaper and more convenient that the bigger systems, sometimes
> faster and sometimes easier to use but they don't add anything to the
> pool of computer science.
  
        We're not talking computer science here, we're talking
        innovative products.  Perhaps it is true that PCs "don't add
        anything to the pool of computer science."  I believe that
        PCs have done much to accelerate the pace of product
        innovation.

        Bob

    RE: .39
    
    The problems at Mintz, Levin were due to failures that we did not find
    in our laboratory testing, involving Digital's fast alternative LAN
    protocol (LAST) and its interaction with the file server. Unless my data
    is out-of-date, Mintz, Levin still uses PATHWORKS. The "fiasco" hinted
    at was the 24-hour, 7-day engineering coverage that we needed to give
    to that site to find the problems, and a measure of the unhappiness of
    the customer that it took that long to find the problems.
    
    PATHWORKS has all the complexity and characteristics of an operating
    system, layered upon VMS. When I last looked, it was the 2nd-largest
    software product sold by Digital - with VMS itself being the first -
    in both actual revenue and units sold. I believe that PATHWORKS is
    behind most of what we are selling today - that the ability to connect
    PCs to a file server running on the VAX is an essential ingredient for
    VAX sales today.
    
    The DIGITAL notesfile is probably not an appropriate place to discuss
    our customers by name. PATHWORKS has many Fortune-100 companies and
    major government installations using
    it as their flagship file server, because, as I stated before, we have
    claimed a niche market - we, along with Banyan, are the only two
    manufacturers of high-capacity (500+ connect) file servers.
    
    							Jon Campbell

    
    I just bought the computer-shopper magazine, which any one buys
    before they buy a PC or a PC item, and there is no DEC ad. in it, 
    now, how are people including us DECeees supposed to know about our 
    PC products if we dont put Ads. in this magazine? I know we DECeees
    can go to VTX and figure out what model we want and hit PF3 and all
    that to try to figure what is there, but it is MUCH MORE EASY to look
    at the Ad. in the magazine and see pictures and description like
    all the other Ads!

    so, how much does one page Ad. costs? one thousand bucks? even 2 
    thousands bucks!
    
    can't DEC afford this? I just dont get it. are we in the PC business
    or are we not?

    well...never mind..

    \bye
    \nasser

    I agree.
    
    I also looked through Computer Shopper this weekend.  This is the first
    place one looks for information on a PC.  I thought maybe our hotshot
    PC's might be creating a stir and I needed a lift...
    
    Bummer
    Ken

    yea, and why aren't we selling at the flea market computer shows. 
    everyone knows this is where you go to get bootlegged, er i mean
    Inexpensive (or is it cheap) hardware and software.

    re: .46
    
    I don't like "ain't it awful" discussions, but here goes:
    
    Digital just canceled much of its advertising budget. I don't
    understand how a computer company is supposed to sell computers without
    advertising, but that's the story.
    
    Why we wouldn't advertise in Computer Shopper is much more complex.
    It has to do with the "reality" and belief system of our upper
    management (and us as well). Ken Olsen instilled in us, and in the
    managers who worked for him, that PCs were toys, game machines,
    expensive-but-useless oddities for yuppies. (Bill Gates, Phillippe Kahne,
    and others had other ideas on this entirely...). You even find people
    responding to this basenote who have this belief.
    
    Two things happen once that is your reality:
    
    1. When other companies are successful selling hardware and software
    products that are PC-based, YOU DON'T SEE THE DATA. Now, in 1992,
    50% of all hardware and software is PC-based, and we STILL have people
    who don't see the data. Billions of dollars of PCs, and billions of
    dollars of PC software, are sold each year. Small companies are making
    millions. Big ones are making billions. Novell, the vendor of "weenie-
    nets" (what we used to call Novell PC networks), just BOUGHT Unix
    System Labs OUTRIGHT. But Digital "doesn't do PC software" (quote
    from a speech from David Stone, just before he left Digital. Now he's
    a Novell employee!!!).
    
    2. If, in an organization, there are people selling stuff that the
    organization's belief system tells them is not important, or outside
    the "comfort zone" of the organization, then THE ORGANIZATION WILL
    CORRECT FOR THE MISTAKE and subconciously find a way to failure.
    
    In case you hadn't noticed by now, I am attempting to change the belief
    system, based on my own perception of the computer market. I have made
    sure that my perceptions are in synch with the perceptions of the
    customers I work with (who are increasing their use of PCs at a very
    rapid rate), field people who responded to my first memo, what I find
    in the non-Digital computer literature.
    
    PCs are not the be-all and end-all of computing. But they HAVE made for
    a true paradigm shift of the way computing is done. It is just a matter
    of time before virtually all computing chores will be done in this
    very personal, distributed way. Mainframes and minis are no longer
    useful for computing per se; they are still important as file servers,
    but in a truly subservient role to the PCs they serve.
    
    "We think, we act, in accordance with the truth as we believe it.
    Change the way you think, and you'll change the way you act" says Lou
    Tice in Investment In Excellence. Digital is a living laboratory of
    his words.
    
    							Jon Campbell

Earlier this year, when I was helping my father select PCs for automating
his office, I bought issues of Computer Shopper and PC World.  Both magazines
had multipage ad inserts from Digital that compared favorably to those of
any other vendor.  I was impressed.

The lack of Digital ads in recent issues is probably due to the previously
announced cutbacks in all advertising, though I personally think this is
a mistake.  This is very definitely an ad-driven market.

				Steve

P.S.  For those of you wondering, at the time I went through this exercise,
Digital had the best prices of any major vendor for the complete hardware
and software package; I put together two configurations, one from Digital
and one from Dell, and the Digital package was cheaper.  But the Digital
package also had a 45-day wait on availability, which was one of the 
reasons my father ended up with Dell.  (Another reason was that he knew
of Digital's spotty history in the PC market and he didn't feel that we'd
still be there in the future.  Can't say I blame him.)

    >   It is just a matter
    of time before virtually all computing chores will be done in this
    very personal, distributed way.
    
    
    keep making wild statements like this and people will continue to have
    trouble believing you.  A majority yes, but virtually all will never
    happen.  Because a lot does not even need a person there. 

    
    re :48
    
>    yea, and why aren't we selling at the flea market computer shows. 
>    everyone knows this is where you go to get bootlegged, er i mean
>    Inexpensive (or is it cheap) hardware and software.
    
	I can't understand how advertising in "Computer Shopper" and
    selling as described above are comparable.  However, if we can
    sell our computers successfully at flea markets then I'd suggest
    we do it. 
    
    	Hey, if we won't advertise in the trade mags, and our sales
    guys are not able to deal with small potatoes customers maybe a
    flea market will work.
    
    :-)
    Ken
    

    Re: .51
    
    I'm sorry you consider it a wild statement. I really did mean it
    exactly that way. Think of a PC not just as a little computer, but
    as a smart gateway into the databases that keep a company running.
    What has changed, you see, is that the smart gateway (the PC network
    protocol) makes the databases look local, with very little added
    complexity, even though the actual databases be immense ones sitting
    on a VAX, or Compaq super-server (7-Gigabyte disk X 4 now available).
    
    For each of the computing processes that you can name that "normally"
    run on a mainframe or mini, I can probably name an equivalent mechanism
    that runs just as well, just as fast, and a lot cheaper on a PC.
    
    I use again the example of the insurance company in Hartford, CN, which
    uses Novell Netware to RUN their investment/brokerage division. 35
    stock brokers sit at their 386 PCs each day, trading on the NY Stock
    Exchange.
    
    MS-DOS has batch files that are just as usable (and in some respects,
    simpler) than VMS batch files. Many of our customers run MS-DOS batch
    files to do setup and maintenance tasks on their databases (which are,
    of course, kept on the file server).
    
    MS-DOS has relational databases that are just as sophisticated, just
    as fast, and more complete than RDB. I say more complete because they
    have installation and operational procedures that are much easier to
    use, from very small, thin, easy databases to very large, complex
    ones. AND UNTIL JANUARY 31, 1993 YOU CAN BUY ONE OF THESE DATABASES -
    MICROSOFT ACCESS - FOR $100. (Did that sound like a Microsoft sales
    pitch?)
    
    We have a large customer - Fortune 100 manufacturer - which one of its
    divisions on PATHWORKS, using one of the
    readily-available, cheap PC databases (Clipper, I seem to recall).
    
    The point is that good, fast, and cheap - the combination we thought
    impossible before - is staring us in the face. The light at the end
    of the tunnel is a locomotive. We need to turn around this Corporation
    so we are leading the computer industry in those qualities that are
    used to measure companies like Dell and Microsoft.
    
    							Jon

    Re: 48
    
    I recently heard of a story of a Digital salesman who was asked to
    provide a quote for replacing 1000 (you heard me, 1000) PCs. A
    $2 million sale.
    
    The salesman handed the customer a DECDirect Catalog.
    
    "Sanity is more important than success". This salesman was obviously
    not comfortable selling PCs. If that customer has asked him to sell him
    a VAX 9000 with 1000 terminals connected to it - about the same size
    sale and, I might add, much less total compute power - the salesman
    probably would have been happy to spend weeks planning the
    installation.
    
    Digital is not comfortable selling computers to end users, and is not
    comfortable selling computers that would be attractive to end users.
    I want to change that comfort zone.
    
    							Jon

    re:.49
    Minor quibble.  David Stone does NOT work for Novell, unless he already
    quite his AT&T job.
    
    He joined AT&T's Operations Systems division, which has nothing to do
    with Operating Systems.  Stone's division provides support for AT&T's
    cash cow, the long distance network.  If you don't think it takes a lot
    of software to manage a few hundred million telephone calls a day....
    
    BTW, I appreciate the reference to "weenie nets".  That's a bigger part
    of computer networking than our own.  It's a good name to accompany
    another major part of the business, which I call "kiddie comms".  This
    is the whole raft of PC-oriented "telecommunications" software,
    including protocols like Kermit and Zmodem, BBS sytems, Fidonet, etc.,
    which not only ignore all that we know about layered models, proper
    architecture, etc., but still seem to work anyway!  Mostly it's built
    by kids (or feel young at heart) for fun.  I suspect we could learn
    something from them too if we could stop snickering.

    Re: .55
    
    Point well taken; I had misread Stone's new position (thought it
    was *Operating* Systems Division, as in, UNIX).                       
    
    Novell owns 65% of the computer network market. We never considered
    Novell a serious contender to the network market even though their
    protocol - IPX - is just as good a LAN protocol as (and, in some respects
    superior to) DECnet.
    
    If you see some lit that says that Digital is the networking leader,
    it's probably a good question to ask: "in what respect, in this field,
    do we lead?"
    
    							Jon

re Note 2289.17 by ANARKY::BREWER:

>     	Standalone PC's fit a niche... they are hardly the be-all and
>     	end-all. Following existing trends at the expense of innovation and
>     	risk-taking is probably only useful if you are a pacific rim
>     	mega-manufacturer of generic equipment.
  
        I think that our traditional Digital classification of PCs
        into "standalone" and "networked" misses the point.

        A personal computer, like a personal desk or a personal
        telephone, is a device that serves a worker.  Some worker's
        desks have materials on them that are typically created by
        the worker's own hand, with the possible occasional exception
        of a piece of mail or a book.  Other workers' desks are
        mostly occupied with letters or forms that come from other
        workers either within their organization or beyond.

        Obviously extending this illustration to personal computers
        is more complex, because a computer actually does something
        (besides simply providing a work surface and drawers).

        However, the point is the same.  Whether a particular
        person's job requires a great deal of information obtained
        from or shared with others, a modest or occasional letter or
        publication, or none at all, the personal computer serving
        them is still a personal computer.

        Obviously, the more a person needs to deal with outside
        information, the better connectivity that personal computer
        needs.  Often twisted pair connections, even phone lines, are
        sufficient (or perhaps it's the best available connectivity,
        e.g., with portable devices).  Sometimes you need and can
        obtain megabaud connectivity.  Sometimes you can be connected
        all the time; sometimes you can't.

        Nearly ALL personal computers need connections to the outside
        at least occasionally in order to serve their masters -- for
        the majority today, modems and diskette transport provide the
        connectivity.

        Don't think that it is or must be a different beast because
        it has full-time high-bandwidth connections.  What
        distinguishes it are user requirements.

        I think that we at digital, when we discount "standalone
        PCs", have a model of networked PCs that is far too narrow,
        in which the PCs are really just a new kind of multiprocessor
        multi-user system suggestive of a time-sharing legacy.

        Bob

RE: .45
>    The problems at Mintz, Levin were due to failures that we did not find
>    in our laboratory testing, involving Digital's fast alternative LAN
>    protocol (LAST) and its interaction with the file server. 

This is mostly true, but acceptable for this discussion.

Also for the discussion, MINTZ was sold 2 4300's in a cluster, and 300-400 PC's.
They used a package called SOFTSOLUTIONS (document control), and Wordperfect.
There were some other packages used, like PC Time Entry. There was some special
code written that logged numbers of keystrokes on documents so that their clients
could be charged. (Mintz Levin & Cohn is a larg law firm in Boston - one of the
senior partners is "good buddies" with one of our senior attorneys).

>   Unless my data is out-of-date, Mintz, Levin still uses PATHWORKS. 

This is also true. However, the "inside" guy at Mintz lost his job because he
was the one who sold the firm on DEC. Two of their tech support people who where
heavily involved in the decision to go with DEC were asked to leave. Did any of 
our people lose their jobs for this? Their hardware configuration isn't what we
sold them - who paid for that? (see below) I guarantee you the license fees from
this customer didn't cover the cost.

>   The "fiasco" hinted at was the 24-hour, 7-day engineering coverage that 
>   we needed to give to that site to find the problems, and a measure of the 
>   unhappiness of the customer that it took that long to find the problems.

What's missing is the cost involved with this customer. We _GAVE AWAY_ 3 6510's
and all the associated clustering hardware to keep the customer, and one of the
three main complaints they had is, from what I hear, still not fixed. But the 
performance issues and the data corruption issues have been resolved. We also
spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for onsite support of Area and Corporate
Support Engineers for the 4-5 months the crisis lasted.

As for the 24x7 Engineering coverage, that was late in the game and only 
after some very high level talks. As time goes on, Engineering as a whole will 
need to provide 24x365 coverage for these kinds of "crisis" customers. This is
a VERY big sticking point with many Engineering groups, and not for some others.

>    PATHWORKS has all the complexity and characteristics of an operating
>    system, layered upon VMS. When I last looked, it was the 2nd-largest
>    software product sold by Digital - with VMS itself being the first -
>    in both actual revenue and units sold. I believe that PATHWORKS is
>    behind most of what we are selling today - that the ability to connect
>    PCs to a file server running on the VAX is an essential ingredient for
>    VAX sales today.

Wonderful! BUT - if all that profit is eaten up with one major crisis a year,
what good is it? I'm not asserting that this is the case, I'm just trying to
make the point that being second largest seller we have isn't the only 
consideration to make when determining if it's a "good" product or not. All the
burdened costs, many of which are "unknowable" all subtract from that pretty 
number.

>    The DIGITAL notesfile is probably not an appropriate place to discuss
>    our customers by name. 

We can call them whatever you want. Name an engineering group, and with very
few exceptions, I'll name you a crisis. Part of the problem we are going to have
in markets like PC's is with the very slim margins, support costs are going to
eat up a more significant portion of that profit; SOOO, we need to ship a higher
quality product AND sell it right (both problems at MINTZ) THE FIRST TIME.

>   PATHWORKS has many Fortune-100 companies and major government installations 
>   using it as their flagship file server, because, as I stated before, we have
>   claimed a niche market - we, along with Banyan, are the only two
>   manufacturers of high-capacity (500+ connect) file servers.

Scares the heck out of me! 1/2 :-)

Most of you I'm sure are familiar with the phrase, "It only takes one "oh, crap"
to undo a whole pile of "attaboys"." Part of the problem is our quality. Part
of it is that we don't proscribe our support as well as other computer companies.
Part of the problem is we give away support for customers who don't pay for it,
and another problem is that far too many customers take advantage of this fact.
Can we fix them all? Sure, but as any good troubleshooter will tell you, the
first step to solving a problem is recognising that a problem exists. I don't
mean to pick on Pathworks specifically because we as a company do the same thing
over and over again - if it isn't Pathworks this month, it's Ultrix, or the
DRB32, or DECserver 550's, or 785 Floating point, or VMS 5.5 Queue manager, or
the DEQNA, or...  the list goes on and on.

Bryan

    Re: .58
    
    Bryan, you are absolutely right about the quality of PATHWORKS, along
    with many, many other Digital products. (See my original memo 1.5 years
    ago to Jack Smith, which said, in essence, that customers didn't want
    DOA hardware and buggy software).
    
    That wasn't the focus of the note, so I didn't concentrate on it.
    There have been a number of field fiascos with PATHWORKS, as well
    as a number of sleepless Xmas's (I was one of the people in the sleep
    deprivation experiment) getting V4.1 out last year.
    
    And I wasn't trying to make excuses for buggy software, but drive home
    the point that a file server and the companion PC software, taken
    toegther, are extremely complex, but together provide a mechanism to
    truly distribute computing.
    
    Mintz, Levin is also a one-of-a-kind problem. I can't think of another
    case in which the problems were as complex and massive, nor how wrong
    the original solution was...
    
    Thanks for your comments. You are right, we need to understand our
    problems in order to find solutions.
    
    							Jon
    

    Just to add a data point here. I read an article this morning that
    stated Microsoft expects to sell over 1 million copies of Windows NT
    during its first year. Over 32,000 WNT developers kits have already
    been sold, so there should be plenty of software out there ready to
    take advantage of WNT as soon as it hits the streets.
    
    Harry
    

	re: Mintz references

	ok...I've had enuf.....

	references to particular customers and their problems are
	IMHO completely inappropriate for this conference....that
	being said...

>    Mintz, Levin is also a one-of-a-kind problem. I can't think of another
>    case in which the problems were as complex and massive, nor how wrong
>    the original solution was...


	it is *I* who was responsible for the original design of the Mintz
	solution.....the original design was 400+ PCs doing *some* 
	WordPerfect/DOS and then running a TE to use All-In-1/VMS with
	WordPerfect/VMS for shared document management, email and 
	assoicated OA tasks...PATHWORKS file services were to primarily
	be a vehicle to upload DOS documents....it wasn't until *long after* 
	(eg almost 6 months) the PO was signed that the customer completely
	redesigned the solution into a entirely PC-based environment centered
	around WordPerfect Office and SoftSolutions. Needless to say the
	file sharing requirements of the two solutions are *radically*
	different......however Digital has always traditionally stepped
	into to help customers even when we are not entirely at fault...
	in this case, fault was obscurred by the fact that the new solution
	exposed extreme problems in PATHWORKS...not only the now well known
	LAST/LANSESS issues but also clustering and VMS system issues...many
	of these issues are now the topics of lengthy engineering white papers
	that have educated the field in some detailed technical shortcomings
	of PATHWORKS that were previously unknown....the largest of these
	(which remains true to this day) was the misnomer propogated by PCSG
	marketing that large VAXs plus VMS clustering plus PATHWORKS could 
	create mega_PC_fileservers.................

	with that off my chest, lets end the PATHWORKS is the problem
	rathole....I happen to agree with arguements that, like it or
	not, PCs are (at least) the real near-term future for the industry
	and that DEC better start creating a business model and products
	that can make us succeed in what is a radically different market
	than the one that created us (or that we created).........current
	style "workstations", timesharing glass-room mahcines and even
	"super servers" are all becoming either niche or obsolete...I also 
	agree that it may not be entirely logical, but that is somewhat 
	irrelevant...we can discuss that issue either in future notes or 
	on the unemployment line ;-)

	(I'll probably get hammered on that last paragraph but it is MHO)

	_kelley (who now does *all* his work on networked PCs running Windows)

re: .53

>>  MS-DOS has relational databases that are just as sophisticated, just
>>  as fast, and more complete than RDB. I say more complete because they
>>  have installation and operational procedures that are much easier to
>>  use, from very small, thin, easy databases to very large, complex
>>  ones. AND UNTIL JANUARY 31, 1993 YOU CAN BUY ONE OF THESE DATABASES -
>>  MICROSOFT ACCESS - FOR $100. (Did that sound like a Microsoft sales
>>  pitch?)

I looked into ACCESS and found the following:

	- Max database size 128 MB
	- Very user-friendly
	- Non-standard, non-SQL
	- Single-user
	- Well integrated with Visual Basic

This doesn't really compete with the market that Rdb is after (not saying that
it won't in the future, though).

As far as completeness goes, I don't know of any that support SQL MODULE
LANGUAGE and all of the precompilers that Rdb supports (not even Oracle and
Ingres do).

As far as speed goes, I haven't heard of MS-DOS based produces of reports for
TPC benchmark numbers. SQL Server on OS/2 which is SYBASE could count however.
Generally, products like Oracle, Ingres, SYBASE, Rdb, etc., report these
benchmark numbers, and it's been a leapfrog game over the past few years.

As far as sophistication goes, I'd probably have to agree on user-interface
issues, but I'd disagree with you in terms of tuning, maintenance,
supportability, recovery, international character support, etc.

I'd agree with you on the installation issues but we're working on installation
improvements to the current VMSINSTAL-based installation, as well as converting
to SPIA-based installation. As far as installation times, we take about 28
minutes on a 4000-60. I'd love to talk about Alpha installation times, but don't
know if that's permitted yet.

We're also working on our NT port. I heard that either Bill Gates or a MS
spokesman announced that Rdb was porting to NT at COMDEX.


Michael Moy
DEC Rdb Engineering

	almost forgot to mention...

>What's missing is the cost involved with this customer. We _GAVE AWAY_ 3 6510's

	the 6510's were *loaned* albeit for a long time...in the end
	Mintz bought 3 4000/500s and kept the 2 original 4000/300s
	for their Washington office....although this probably only
	put a dent in our "cost of sale", it wasn't a *total* loss ;-}

	what Mintz should teach us most of all is that our MIS-centric
	minicomputer-background-based concept of large centralized
	PC LANs is probably fundamentally flawed....these environments
	trade one set of problems for another.......DEC needs to start
	thinking more like the 80 million plus PC owners who now make
	up the bulk of the computing power on the planet...desktop up
	instead of datacenter down.....

	_k

	>.......DEC needs to start thinking more like the 80 million plus 
        >PC owners who now make	up the bulk of the computing power on the 
        >planet...desktop up instead of datacenter down.....

    will, on this line of thought, I was determined to buy a PC today,
    i just had enough of life without a big PC, so I gave DEC a chance
    to take my money, the price for the 486DX2-66mhz system I wanted was not 
    even close from DEC. I ended up buying one from gateway (their local
    Bus model), but the monitor I got  from different vendor (NEC 17" monitor), 
    total tag $4,400 with all the goodies and free software (Borland paradox 
    and other tools), tape backup, fax/modem, 340 MB 13 ms, ATI ultrPRO 
    graphic board etc..included in the system.

    gateway cant keep up with the orders, their 800 number was BUSY every
    time I tried it, finally at 7:00 pm i managed to get through. the
    person told me on the phone they are 3 weeks behind , too many orders!
    what a nice problem to be in.

    by the way, the DEC person who helped me before I went to gateway 
    was quite helpful and nice, BUT this idea of asking people to write
    down those code numbers of what they are ordering down on a piece of 
    paper is really weird, I was told to write them down so 
    that i can use these to know how to set up my systems! Gee-whize! I
    called many places before, no one asked me to write down long numbers
    down on paper that i have no idea what they are and what they mean?

    any way, I would have liked to buy the stuff from DEC offcourse, but
    we dont know how to sell PC's.

    \nasser

re: -.mumble... PATHWORKS... maybe worth another topic...hmm 

	What is this I hear about that the funding of PATHWORKS for OSF/1 has
	been dropped?

	I would have thought that the code for OpenVMS and for OSF/1 be
	almost the same by now... with HYDRA and everything.

	These news really strike me!

	-Pasi-

    My (tongue-in-cheek) 2 cents worth...
    
    With all this argument about the future of computing and PC's vs. big
    machine (VAX), has anyone considered that without the VAX, there is no
    VAXNotes?  So we can't even have this discussion in the future if all
    we use is PC's!!! :-)  O.K., I know there are other forms of
    information sharing, and maybe even a PC Network based equivalent to
    NOTES, but the IRONY of the discussion just struck me as very funny...
    
    :-) Otto.

    
      Way back in this note, somebody said PC's had already taken over
    the CAD market.  As one who attends numerous CAD and DA shows,
    and who has spent a long time writing, using, evaluating, and
    buying CAD software, this is not my impression.  You do see
    Macintosh and PC CAD as a growing segment, but UNIX-based
    workstations (particularly the Sun SPARC) are still dominant.
    
      This may change, but if it does, it probably matters less
    in CAD than anywhere.  The PC's/MAC's you see all have 10K
    to 20K of additional DRAM's (128 megs is common), perpherals,
    software, terminals, etc.  You spend almost no time in the
    operating system anyway.  This market is technical/algorithmic
    and performance driven.  If you want to do finite element
    analysis, 3D solid modeling with animation, SPICE on a whole
    PWB, placement algorithms on a 1-Meg transistor ASIC, then
    the truth is, no computer really does the trick today.  One
    software vendor recently told me, "Alpha is nice.  If it were
    only about TWO orders of magnitude faster..."
    
      There is a crisis in CAD - people expect n-p complete problems
    to get solved even though they are doubling 'n' all the time.  In
    the face of this, doubling or tripling computer speed barely makes
    a difference.
    
      I think the Alpha-based PC, running Windows NT, would be a
    credible CAD platform in today's market, but it won't solve
    the problem for us REAL guys who do REAL computation.
    
      Computers need to get MUCH faster...
    

    re:.66
    You think  you need a VAX for Notes?  Check out
    PCAPP1::PATHWORKS_CONFERENCING.  Note PCAPP1 is a PC running OS/2.
    And there are _lots_ of non-VAX Notes clients.
    
    Besides, Lotus Notes makes VAX Notes look sick.  (It's not really
    comparable, however.  While the same people wrote it, Lotus Notes goes
    way beyond the limited VAX Notes model, and does many more tricks that
    Digital's VAXcentric products can't even imagine.)

    Re: 66
    
    Do not fear losing NOTES. Lotus has taken up your cause, with
    LotusNotes, which is based on (you guessed it) VAXNotes.
    
    As David Stone said, "We don't do PC software" (so someone else will).
    
    Re: 65
    
    I do not know what the Corporation's strategy is regarding LANManager
    and Netware. Keep in mind that LANManager comes almost for free with
    Windows-NT, which runs on Alpha today, and it is an enhanced version
    of LANManager to take advantage of UNICODE, the 16-bit character set
    supported by Windows-NT (as a matter of fact, Windows-NT is the only
    major OS that supports UNICODE).
    
    							Jon

There is another plausible reason for not advertising in the Computer 
Shopper.  We are not trying to compete against Gateway and the other low 
cost vendors.  We're trying to compete against Dell, Compaq, HP, and the 
like.  

Computer Shopper is generally for people looking to get the cheapest PC.  
We can't win on that criterion, so why waste money trying?  We want to win 
on the large installations -- the sort of people who buy dozens, hundreds, 
or thousands at a time, who want our on-site service, who will continue to 
pay us for onsite service after the one-year warranty has expired, and who 
are willing to pay for quality onsite service instead of Gateway's "Let's 
swap and ship boards before we try sending a technician."  These people 
don't look in Computer Shopper to find the best deals.

Last I looked, we were still advertising in PC Magazine and the like.

   Gary

Given Gateway is now a $1B company and climbing, I hope we're figuring
out how to get our overhead levels to where we can reasonably compete,
rather than just saying "we can't".  We may be trying to compete with
Dell this year, but Dell/Compaq are presumably trying to figure out
how to compete with Gateway.  If we aren't, we're going to suffer the
consequences just as much as our enormous investment in persuing a dying
"mainframe" market.  The competition and the market don't stand still.

Furthermore, note that Dell *does* have ads in Computer Shopper, so that
is no excuse if we are really trying to compete with them.

        With respect to our not adverstising in the Computer Shopper. I
    feel it is a very arrogant attitude towards the entire PC market. Most
    mail order purchases(which we are trying to succed in) are coming from
    the Computer Shopper. Gateway is not a low end computer, and Dell and
    Compaq both advertise in there. Digital needs the widest exposure we
    can get in this highly competitve market. If we are to succed we need
    the student using our systems and being happy with them. Apple has an 
    agreement with Stanford Univ. to sell Macintoshes at a discounted
    price. Why ? Because these are the same people who will have input in
    their future companies bying decisions. By not being seen in the
    Computer Shopper we are missing and entire segment of the market. If we 
    are in the PC business we need to be in all the way. If we only target
    corporations we have already lost. Comaq realized this as has Dell
    and both are recovering nicely. People will buy what they are
    familiar with and have had good experiences with. 
         I am currently in the market for a PC, and tried to give my
    business to Digital, instead I was told I was not a real customer and
    it would be awhile before I could purchase one of our LP models. This
    amazes me as we are being told that we have to learn windows nt to
    support our future customer base, and do it on our own. Most people
    are willing to invest personal time learning and invest our money in a 
    PC, but I would hope the company would make the tools available at
    cost. Digital already makes a profit :) on me every day, trying to make
    a profit on a purchase that will ultimately help Digital is pretty low. 
    I will buy through the Computer Shopper and get the best price available
    for a solid machine. I will continue to read PC WEEK and Byte to learn
    more. Many MIS managers do the same. Please do not deceive yourself
    into believeing they will buy from us because we are DEC. If we do not 
    attack the market aggresively we are lost in this business. I have been
    hearing we are offering multivendor support for PC so the argument that 
    companies will buy DEC for service holds little water. They will buy 
    anybodies and DEC will service it. Please try to think as if you are
    the customer. When you buy a car you buy within a cost guideline and
    will usually buy from a recognizable company. DEC is not that
    recognizable in this market.       
         I am reminded of an old LCG saying "if its not 36 bits you are 4
    bits short". Where are the DEC10 and 20s today? Will VAX be there
    tommorow?
    
       Bob
    

    .72
    
    The LP model of the DEC PC is not avaliable any more.
    
    ref NT, I just ordered the NT developer kit from microsoft, for $69
    you need CD reader for that and 16 MB memory, they'll also send you the 
    commerical NT version when it is out for free ( some time early next year) 
    as well for this price. I figured for $69 + $10 shipping is worth it to 
    learn NT and the price is right. 
    
    \nasser

An extra few data points. Over here, 72% of "PC" magazine readers work in
companies of less than 200 employees. Less than 9% work in companies of
greater than 1000 people (ie: traditional DEC markets). We have almost
identical results for Computer Shopper here.

64% of each readership consider themselves to be "power users". Both also have
96-97% male readership (read: opportunity; I don't believe this is
representative of the gender of PC users worldwide!).

Jon was spot on with the references to Lou Tice's Investment in Excellence
course. I did this around 3 years ago... and you'll be amazed how many times
senior management "self talk" their way out of potentially lucrative areas
for investment at this first hurdle. Listen out for phrases like "we've
never been successful in <name your market> before" and similar ;-)

								- Ian W.

Has anybody actually asked the powers-that-be why we're not advertising in
Computer Shopper?  I hope it's because callers are asked where they got
our number, and it's been found that Computer Shopper isn't cost effective.

    Re:
>>  <<< Note 2289.75 by NOTIME::SACKS "Gerald Sacks ZKO2-3/N30 DTN:381-2085" >>>
>>
>>Has anybody actually asked the powers-that-be why we're not advertising in
>>Computer Shopper?  I hope it's because callers are asked where they got
>>our number, and it's been found that Computer Shopper isn't cost effective.
>>

    Gerald, I doubt that so many others would advertise month after month,
    year after year if it isn't cost effective.
    	The cost to put in one page is $8000 per month.  8k per month is a
    lot for a mom and pop shop, especially if it doesn't pay...

    Jim Morton

    
    I'll go out on a limb and risk offending a few people by agreeing with
    .67 in that PC based CAD (for mechanical design, at least) is rubbish
    at this point in time.  I've tried AutoCAD R11, Ashlar-Vellum, and seen
    countless other demos, and they are all mere toys compared to Real
    Men's Cad, like UniGraphics and PRO/Engineer.
    
    I'll also add that there is not enough computing power in the known
    universe to adequately address the demands of a complex, multi-part
    solid model.  In the past decade, I've doubled and tripled and
    quadrupled my MIPS with no noticible increase in performance.  Even
    HP's 75 MIPS PA/Risc boxes grind to a halt on a complex solid.  We need
    orders of magnitude improvements.
    
    Ed

    Geeeez! I thought Digital was getting away from the male chauvinism
    stuff.  What is this "Real Men's CAD" stuff?   Do you think women don't
    know how to use CAD or workstations?  I once saw a flyer that said
    "Real Men Don't Use Menus" - hogwash!  
    
    A Female (but you probably already figured that out)
    

RE: 			-< Real Men's CAD???? >-

We know what he really meant to say......Real WoMen's CAD.  Right?  Otherwise
about a dozen female designers here could take offense to the statement.  :-)
We've come along way, but it still feels like a man's world.

Judy

    Someone once said "Women can't handle irony" but I told her she was
    wrong.
    

    re: the last few
    
    It has gotten to the point where I am afraid to say anything for fear
    of offending someone (women, ethnic groups, gays, children, animal
    lovers, etc.).  And my wife wonders why I don't talk to her!
    

    The moral of the story is... Be Yourself... 
    
    Nancy

    
    I used caps in Real Men's CAD to indicate, somewhat wryly, the
    absurdity of the phrase.  Of course, some hyper-sensityve wymmyn types
    will always miss the joke.
    
    My real intent was to offend AutoCAD users, not wymmyn.
    
    Ed

    
    Guess I started the trouble in .67.  Right now, the woman in the
    office to my left is doing real women's electrical CAD using
    Allegro on a DECstation 5000, Ultrix.  The guy on my right is
    doing real men's CAD using VLS on a VAX.  And I am in the middle
    doing real-slow-little-boy's CAD with PADS/PCB on a PC.  It stinks !
    
    Maybe they are trying to tell me something....
    

    I'm glad to see many people still have their sense of humor.  I knew my
    reply might get a rise out of someone....  
    
    By the way, I use my PC AND LOVE IT!!  I also use Windows, Excel,
    Word for Windows and other good stuff.  You couldn't get me to use
    DECwrite or DECpresent if you threatened to break my arms!
    
    Hey, have a great New Year - 1993 is going to be a dilly at DEC.
    KB
    

    re: -1
    
    Thanks a lot.  Just what a lot of other people needed... More stress.
    
    
    funny huh?
    
    Allan

re: .71

I essentially agree.  We must aim for this market, one way or another,
to succeed in the PC hardware business.  Personally, I believe that
name recognition is a strong reason for continuing to advertise one way
or another.  But we also need to be aware of the negatives:  we don't
want an ad campaign that appears to be "We're Digital and our PC's are
more expensive than the others you see advertised in this magazine" -- at
least not in that particular magazine.  In other words, our advertising
campaign needs to be synchronized with our relative position price-wise.  

As another example, I believe we missed an opportunity by not
advertising the DECjet 1000 heavily enough at the time when it was
a price leader (which is was for a few months earlier this year).  Now, the 
HP and Canon printers have come down in price, so we no longer have that 
advantage.

It's a complex business.  There are no easy decisions, nor are there
any risk-free decisions.  

   Gary

Jon --

I really appreciate your efforts to communicate up to Palmer, Strecker and Co.,
and hope that you will continue with your efforts. In particular, I'd like to
think that your mail about NT that included my NT trip report had some affect on
DEC's new 'NT is important' strategy. (But I'm not so naive to really believe it
did...)

But why do I always get the feeling that noone is listening?  Do you ever get
responses from these guys?  Other than a 'Thanks for your mail -- we appreciate
your input.' type token responses (if that?) ?

And while I agree with all these notes about the fact that the world of
computing has changed, and the future is more and more towards PCs and
high-volume, low-margin, it's my impression that the powers that be in Digital
have basically said that we're not in that market except to move iron a la Dell
et. al., and to get those PCs hooked up to our server iron.  We're apparently no
longer even in the software market, except to support our precious Silicon and
Systems Integration -- one of those 'S' words got dropped, somewhere alone the
way, perhaps when Stone left. 

So are we wasting our breath?

Bryan

    re: the replies in here about small systems (ie - PCs) and how they
    can't handle "real" computing jobs.
    
    I've been thinking about this over the holiday and I can't help but
    wonder if some IBM mainframers said the same thing about our VAX
    systems at some of the sites where we came in during the 80s and kicked
    butt.  (Those little VAX minnies are fine for twinky jobs, but the REAL
    work happens on these S/370s running MVS . . .) And now look what *we*
    say now that we're getting *our* butts kicked all over the place.
    
    Kind of a sobering thought, isn't it?
    
    One more personal observation: I had a flat tire the other day, spent
    about 3 hours trying to change the !@#$%^&*() tire in the dark, only to
    find that it had an anti-theft lugnut I couldn't see 'cuz it was dark. 
    When all else failed, I read the owners manual and found the car has an
    adapter to take the damn lugnut off.  Progress??  Grrrrr!
     
    Next day, I went down to Grossman Chevrolet to get some *real* lugnuts. 
    While I was standing there at the parts counter I couldn't help but look
    at what they now use to print invoices and what they now have on their
    desktops.
    
    Now, there was an outfit called ADP that did software for car
    dealerships.  Used to be, you would walk into a dealership and see
    VT220s all over the place.  Each of these would have a little ADP decal
    on the side.  But by gawd, these were real DEC VT220s and it did my
    heart good to see 'em in car dealerships all over the place.
    
    Meanwhile, back at this parts counter, I saw a bunch of brand X PCs
    with what looked like nice monitors and some little dot-matrix printers
    to print invoices.  The PCs had that same familiar ADP decal on the
    side.  And over on the left was an old yellowed LA120 DECwriter III
    (still the best printer ever made) that looked like it was now
    gathering dust.  Not a DEC VT terminal in sight.  One of those PCs printed 
    my invoice for the lugnuts.
    
    I hope we still have a server in the back room someplace, but somehow
    I'm not optimistic.
    
    Folks, we either change with the times or die!
    
    - Greg Scott, OpenVMS Partner and grizzled DEC veteran

re .89

Greg, I couldn't agree with you more.  When I worked at John Hancock in the
early 1980s, the PDP-11/70 I worked on and the VAX 11/780 in the corner were the
only Digital computers in a big IBM shop.  We were the toys then.  History is
repeating itself but this time we're IBM.

I love OpenVMS and hope it never die.  But we must realize that the majority of
computers people stare at all day are PCs.  I believe there is a place for both
PCs and servers.  There is not one operating system or hardware platform that
will take over the world.  What *will* take over the world is the style of
computing that has been brought about by the PC.

This battle is being fought with outdated terms.  My VAXstation 3100, running a
DECwindows Motif interface at 8 SPECmarks, is a workstation.  The VAX 6540 in
the computer room runs a bit faster and is called a server.  But soon the Alpha
AXP machine on my desk (wishful thinking, no?) will be running Windows NT at 80
SPECmarks and will be called a PC.  All of this makes the labels we have used
pretty meaningless.  It's time we concentrated on how people use computers and
what they want from them rather than getting bogged down in the silly PC vs
whatever war.

Paul

    re: .70 and others
    
    Greg Feldman and others dismiss Gateway 2000 as not being our
    competition.  Desktop Direct's ads say otherwise.  Look at the
    November-December-ish ads on who's the largest mail-order PC outfit --
    Gateway is right there.  Look in the January 1993 ads for Dell's answer
    to the DEC LP series and the Gateway V series.  That is, for Dell's
    answer to Gateway and tangentially to DEC and others.
    
    Running through this note is the largely unstated assumption that
    technological superiority counts for a great deal.  These days, buying
    a computer for its technical superiority is like buying a car for the
    same reason.  Some people wind up in cars costing twice what most of us
    can afford.  Some people buy panel trucks or four-wheel drive or large
    engines because they need the right thing for their specific uses. 
    Most of us choose automobiles based on other criteria.
    
    Anyone who doubts that other companies can make high quality PCs at low
    cost, or "good enough" PCs at lower cost than us, should browse the
    PC-centric notesfiles and see just how many people have bought the very
    brands dismissed here.  Anyone who still thinks PCs are toys should
    spend time with a 486 local bus model, the DEC LP products or anything
    introduced by competitors after them.  N.B. I own a Gateway 2000
    personal computer.
    
    It's disturbing that personal computers are so difficult to get from
    Digital both on the job and off the job.  The basenoter is spot on.
    
    Wes

    .-1

    >It's disturbing that personal computers are so difficult to get from
    >Digital both on the job and off the job.  The basenoter is spot on.
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    the question is, what are we (DECeees) going to do with a PeeCee in
    our cubes?

    are we going to write PeeCee software on it? compete with microsoft
    and borland and all the other hundreds of software vendors who
    write software for the PeeCee?

    i think we need to have a division in DEC called "PeeCee application
    development division". where we write applications (the ones we
    call shrink wrapped) for all sorts of things, from games to
    scientific applications to medical to business to manufacturing to
    communications to whatever sells.

    flip over the back of any technical magazines nowadays and you'll
    see it full of PeeCee applications, mostly written by 2-3 person
    company. we can make hundreds of 2-3 person companies with the
    software engineers we have in DEC , can't we?

    oh well, never mind, it is Sunday afternoon and i just felt like
    babbling a little...

    thank you for listening and taking notes.
    \nasser

    <<< Note 2289.92 by STAR::ABBASI "iam your friendly psychic hotline" >>>
                  -< so, we get a PeeCee at work, now what? >-

    the question is, what are we (DECeees) going to do with a PeeCee in
    our cubes?

For one thing, discover what the rest of the world is doing.  DECcies have
too often and for too long been isolated from the real world.

    are we going to write PeeCee software on it? compete with microsoft
    and borland and all the other hundreds of software vendors who
    write software for the PeeCee?

Our so-called leaders, from what I can tell, have basically given up on this.  
I think they are right.  There is no way we can compete with MS, Borland, et. 
al., unless we break off software into a separate division (or more than one), 
and change the way we work and do business.  Not likely. And even then, we'd 
have so much catching up to do, it's unreal...   It's no so much the technical
side (although we do have problems there), it's the marketing and distribution
side that we are nowhere near where we need to be.

As I said a few replies back, "Are we wasting our breath?".  Does the fact that
noone's responded yet indicate that it's a rhetorical question?

Bryan

re Note 2289.90 by FUNYET::ANDERSON:

> I believe there is a place for both
> PCs and servers.  

        I believe that an even more illuminating way of viewing this
        is to say that there is a place for both the PC and the
        information service.

        The PC provides the majority of computation and the
        applications (that the user sees) run on the PC (desktop or
        portable).

        However, different users for different tasks will have a need
        for information external to that locally held.  This may be
        the catalog (and even the books!) of the Library of Congress,
        it might be the corporate database, it might be a news wire,
        it might be electronic mail or Notes.

        I would guess that you could call the thing that provides the
        service a "server", but I think that puts the emphasis on the
        wrong thing (the box) and implies that a server is
        necessarily distinct from a PC.

        Obviously a lot of computation is done in the course of
        providing the service.  Some of the boxes providing services
        will be quite large (but some could be quite small).  Some
        services will be provided in a highly distributed fashion
        (i.e., no one box or set of boxes is the server).  There will
        be a lot of networking involved.

        But everything will be driven by the needs of individuals
        (typically as members of groups) and those individuals will
        express those needs through the applications on the personal
        information appliance.

        It is foolish to say we are in the server business.  We might
        be in the services business.  We could conceivably be in the
        business of supplying the "equipment" (hardware and software)
        to the information services industry (analogous to the
        companies, few in number, that sell switching equipment to
        phone companies).  Note, however, that many of the likely
        players in the information services industry will have
        captive or allied "equipment" suppliers of their own and are
        not likely to buy from us (e.g., AT&T).

        Bob

Re: .29

> Our so-called leaders, from what I can tell, have basically given up on this. 
> I think they are right. 

I think they're wrong.

> There is no way we can compete with MS, Borland, et. 
> al., unless we break off software into a separate division (or more than 
> one), and change the way we work and do business.  Not likely. And even then, 
> we'd have so much catching up to do, it's unreal...   

There are a couple of mentality changes, though it may not go as far as
setting up a separate division. The division of pre and post sales services
into separate organisations needs to end for this business. The advertising
expense line needs to be attached to the revenue number and not subject to
the normal annual negotiation games (thankyou for your projected revenue,
that's been accepted... however the expense line looks far too steep).

> It's no so much the technical
> side (although we do have problems there), it's the marketing and distribution
> side that we are nowhere near where we need to be.

We're closer on the marketing and distribution side than we are on the
products themselves. The product packaging needs attention, but we can sort
that quite quickly in conjunction with each corporate product manager. The
advertising needs investment and then a tie to sales volumes. We're largely
there at that point... all but the contents of the box.

It's easy for people to talk themselves out of this, even when the products
are excellent (witness Vivace and eXcursion). It's only that there seems a
mental block about doing things like putting the "Microsoft Windows" logo on
the box (against corporate identity guidelines) and describing the product
there also. We should be able to shrinkwrap a pallet-full of the boxes the
end user sees - and keep away from ^%#$!# brown boxes.
								- Ian W.

	re .70:

>Computer Shopper is generally for people looking to get the cheapest PC.  
>We can't win on that criterion, so why waste money trying?  We want to win 
>on the large installations -- the sort of people who buy dozens, hundreds, 
>or thousands at a time, who want our on-site service, who will continue to 
>pay us for onsite service after the one-year warranty has expired, and who 
>are willing to pay for quality onsite service instead of Gateway's "Let's 
>swap and ship boards before we try sending a technician."  These people 
>don't look in Computer Shopper to find the best deals.

	All this applies equally to vendors like Compaq and Dell. Come
	to think of it, only a handful can offer rock bottom prices. In
	any magazine, you will find up to several thousand dollars'
	discrepancy between vendors of essentially the same system.
	Sometimes, you get what you pay for; sometimes you don't. The
	fun lies in sorting out the wheat from the chaff.

	"Certainly the game is rigged, but don't let that stop you -
	 it's the only game in town".

	/Tom

Copied verbatim from a 5 by 10 foot plastic plaque on the wall of MLO1-2:

        "From the beginning we have believed that computers should be
   tools that can be used by people who need information to do their jobs.
       We have promoted the design of interactive computer systems that
        can be placed where they are needed.  We see the trend toward
          increased use of interactive, distributed computer systems
                  as confirmation of our basic philosophy."

                                                          Ken Olsen
                                                             1978

    
      Alas, to .93, it is not so simple.  I got my PC a while back.
    I tried to do some engineering work on it, but found it inferior
    to the (more expensive) workstation I already had.
    
      So I'm using it as a terminal.  It makes a good one.
    
      I won't find anything out about the 'real world', if there
     is one, by simply putting any equipment in my office.  From
     what I've heard from my non-DEC friends, data processing in
     other companies is mostly just as screwed-up as it is here.
     All I have to say is 'computer', and at any party I get
     endless stories of disasters and catastrophes, using PC's,
     Mac's, VAX's, IBM mainframes, workstations, etc.  The 'real'
     data processing world is a veil of tears.
    

re: .90, others

I should have added that I didn't agree with this world view point.  I
was merely proposing what I believe to be a rationalization.  In
other words, I believe that we should view Gateway, etc. as our 
competition, but that our actions, whether or not I agree with them, 
indicate that we are trying to price ourselves and compete against Dell, 
Compaq, etc.  

Also, in fairness to the powers that be, they may be well aware of
this, and simply allowing pragmatics to govern our entry into this
market.  For example (and this is pure speculation), suppose it were
determined that we could price ourselves 10% lower, sell more systems,
and still make a profit, except for one point: we don't yet have the
capacity to deliver those systems within a reasonable time frame.  In that
case, we might well be better off waiting, by keeping slightly higher 
prices and doing less advertising, until our production capacity
caught up with the potential demand.  

  Gary (not Greg)

well, one thing you will need a Pee Cee for , Nasser, is when you manager
makes you run Inspect lockdown procedure so will will now have a safe 
secure Vax node where no more can be done useful work.

Fortunately Inspect not running yet on PC so can still get work done there.
May end soon, though. Too easy to get data....I should go to bed now...
Inspectors will be crucifying me tommorrow maybe...rocky

    
    re: .0
    
    	One potential danger I see to your note is that it causes us to focus
    too much on TODAY's style of computing. You ask management to provide
    everyone at DEC with a desktop PC. 
    	Just as we became too fixated with the mini, we can't afford to do
    the same with PCs/micros.
    	There is a revolution going on in the industry and as some have
    remarked much of it is chaotic and irrational. 
    	We need to look at many other methods of computing as well. We are 
    witnessing the downscaling now and need to be aware and use not only
    desktop PCs, which are at the TOP of the computing scale in some
    respects, but there are laptops, notebooks, palmtops and other
    computers at various scales.
    	At some point we may see a real shift from downscaling to
    transparency and ergonomics. AI, robotics, nanotechnology are gathering
    steam and will enable the computer to blend in with our environment and
    open up new horizons.
    	There are plenty of books on the subject so I won't go on. I just
    don't want to see us focus on one very chaotic marketplace at the
    expense of all other important computing styles and emerging
    technologies.
    
    Regards,
    
    	Jim K