Conference 7.286::digital

>So what did you all think of the Oct 12 Announcement or at least the part
>that was shown on DVN?
>
>The general opinion here was that the part shown on DVN live from Paris was
>crap. It was boring, uninformative and had no meat behind the buzzwords.
>I was very glad that nobody had invited any customers.
>Hopefully the US one was much better.
    
    I don't watch announcements anymore. They're all boring. Does anyone
    go to them who doesn't have to?
    
>Another question is how come Europe got the second-string team? I belive
>Bob and the big CBU boys were in Santa Clara while we got Ed and Willow.
>After all the Digital does do more business in Europe than the States.

    I thought that Digital did more business outside the US than inside. I
    thought it took the non European business added to the European
    business to make that total. Is that incorrect?

    			Alfred

    I think the business ranking is:
    
    	1  Europe
    	2  USA
    	3  APA
    
    Nick

    What a disappointment!
    
    If this was "Digital's most important product announcment in our
    history", then chalk this one up as another marketing dud.  Put Rick
    Frasier on stage instead of doing pre and post commentary like it was the
    Miss America contest.
    
    When are they going to learn that Bob Palmer is a great speaker, but is
    out of place "bantering" with customers on stage and on video.  The
    guys from Bank of Montreal were boring, confusing and unconvincing.
    
    The field offices were encourgaed to invite customers to this
    announcment, yet the DVN had absolutely NO meat and John Donovan's
    talk, while interesting, was totally inappropriate for a product
    announcment.  The few customers that showed up to watch a one-hour talk
    left with no new product knowledge and probably no better feeling about
    Digital being serious about UNIX.
    
    Don't worry Europe, you didn't miss anything!
    
    KC

Customers get excited about "stuff".  Stuff like the world's fastest
workstation, like how they can add an Alpha AXP computer to their VAXcluster,
like how they can run UNIX real fast on their desktop with one of the new
workstations.

Customers don't get excited about client/server fluff.  I've never seen a DVN to
which I'd be proud to bring a customer.  There's just no meat.

Boil all the announcements down to what is relevant to your customer.  Present
*that* and they'll get excited.

Paul

I disagree. Although there weren't a lot of details in the talk, it was
only a one-hour anouncement. How much detail can you talk about in one
hour anyway? The point of the broadcast from my perspective was to 
excite the public about new opportunities from Digital snd to show our 
commitment to them by our product offerings. Now it's up to the sales force to
go out and sell us.

Viewing the presentation from a customers POV, i was excited about it and
now would want to know more. I agree that the guys from Montreal didn't add
much to the meat and Dr. Donovan would make a great comedian and he was
a very dynamic speaker, although his basic message was just "harmony in IT". 

In anycase, there are an awful lot of complainers in this conference and i 
generally don't read it because it just brings me down and negativity is
contagious. I mean let's try to have a better attitude towards this company 
here. 

/james

    
    I liked the announcement.  I thought Donovan's presentation was very,
    very effective.  I would have preferred a closer tie-in between
    Donovan's message and how it relates to Digital's ability to deliver
    client/server solutions, services, and support.
    
    Nevertheless, I am optimistic about the entire corporation's
    "awakening" to the needs and expectations of a information-hungry
    market.  I am convinced that we are on the right path and I hope that
    we can use it to our advantage, to make Digital *THE* industry leader
    in client/server computing.
    
    For more information, check the C/S Notes conference at:
    
                          DECEAT::CLIENT_SERVER
    
    
    And also, e-mail me at SOJU::SLATER to get on the C/S Dist. List for
    good info on C/S. 
    
    
    Bill

    
    I also liked the announcement.  Perhaps it was because I was able
    to attend it live, since I work in Santa Clara.  Somehow videotape
    loses a lot of the oomph...
    
    Anyway, all of the customers I brought thought it was excellent. And,
    it is only 9:30 a.m. here the day after the announcement and I've
    already had three customers call to ask for demos of Linkworks.
    
    The only disappointment in my opinion is that as usual the San Jose
    Mercury News completely ignored it.  The only reference at all was
    a paragraph in the Bits & Bytes column, which referred to the
    announcement almost as an aside to a blurb about Digital's new
    chip design lab in Palo Alto.  I don't understand why we can't put
    somebody on the payroll to make sure the Silicon Valley press 
    recognizes that HP and SUN are not the only computer companies in the
    world.
    
    

    We received several very POSITIVE comments about the
    announcement from press
    analysts. I have a memo from unix::farrell (vickie; the UNIX marketing
    manager) with the quotes. Check with her for a copy.

    Well, here's my $.02 worth.
    
    Here in Dallas we had standing room only.  Somewhere near 250 (200 w/o
    Digital people), registration was much less, we had to add chairs,
    didn't even have enough lunch for such a turnout.
    
    The announcement made the National Public Radio news heard locally at
    7:10am rebroadcast (presumably at the initial 5:10am broadcast as
    well).
    
    Coverage also in the Dallas Morning News, the only remaining major
    paper.
    
    General perception was that the live link to Santa Clara was well
    received, the local presentation was a let down (it's tough to follow
    polish like BP and the Cambridge guy), but overall an OK event.  We
    could have made it better, but believe me it could have been a lot
    worse (a lot of people worked really hard to pull it together in the
    last week or so in the major cities in the US).
    
    Steve

    Re: .3   > The few customers that showed up to watch, etc...
    
    FEW is an understatement!  In my office, we had ONE customer show
    up.  Not surprising, since we only had TWO Sales Reps and ONE
    Sales Support Rep show up!
    
    Out of curiousity, I asked a few Sales Reps why there were not more
    Reps and customers at the DVN.  The answers I got were mostly
    sarcastic, such as "What customers?" (Implying that we have none 
    here in the U.S.) or "You sound surprised that no one cares any more"
    
    sad...
    
    FWIW, as for the DVN, I thought it was well done.

Very interesting. You folks who had only a few customers show up ...
watch for a change in local management.

    DECie Diary Log Entry: 12-OCT-1993
     
    Pharmaceuticals: Sudafed, Clortrimatron, and Caffine

    Resources: Yeah, right...
   
    Mission: Move stuff out the door

    Codename: Operation Rolling Thunder II

    Encryption:EBG13


    EARLY TUESDAY MORNING DAY OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT
     
    Tossed and turned most of night (allergies and antihistamines fighting
    each other) so I got up early to finish staging the New DECpc 425 for 
    the District manager's secretary.  DOS 6, MSwindows,MSword,Excel, 
    Powerpoint, Visual Basic, 50 games -- You know the usual customer 
    installation.

    The Secretary told me she had a 500MB disk drive... Yeah sure.. 
    get it home and it's 128MB...

    Had difficulties running DBLSPACE because of preinstall done by
    DEC's factory team... Typical... Plugged a Xircom into the back, 
    connected to the LAN in my garage and booted off my DECnet/Pathworks
    floppy (Xircom requires EXECUTOR PIPELINE QUOTA to be 8-10 for best
    throughput (remember to mention it to the DECUS folks tonight) -- it's 
    such a dumb and slow ethernet adapter but it does just plug in to the 
    Parallel port...)

    Anyways... Connect to the OpenVMS(tm) fileserver and begin to reformat
    the C Drive.  Reload DOS and now DBLSPACE works... Great 248MBs instead
    of 128...  Xcopy Windows and the applications takes about 2 hours and I 
    dose on my Comfy Chair(tm) as it copies.

    I'm startled back from my fitful nap by the melodious BEEP of the the 
    final file. Reboot and check windows and the applications -- fine
    fine..

    Checking the time I Pack the PC in my car and leave..



    AT THE INFOMART IN DALLAS

    I need to get to the Infomart by 9:00am.. Invitations
    say the shindig kicks off at 10 "The Big Announcement"  Some 
    announcement The local PSC hasn't been asked to participate or 
    even for help setting up.  Most of us (sales support) will show
    up anyways.  

    Pulled in 9:03 find the Perfect parking place in front.. Grab 
    my Laptop, Some DECUS newsletters and head inside.

    See Paul Henderson (one of the better Sales people) greeting 
    in the lobby. Say's we're up on the 7th floor so I take the 
    elevator up.

    AT THE COFFEE POT

    The entrance to the announcement room was stocked with Coffee
    and at least one Vice President, Sales people and Distributor's
    Sales People abounded.  I got a name tag, stashed my Laptop and
    headed for the Coffee.  

    Talked with the Management Team and managed to get two cups down 
    before the Antihistamines wore off and the customers arrived...

    "HI Steve" Anything I can help with (Steve Resende had been tasked 
    last week but the equipment (such as it is) flys in the day before
    with and he ends up setting up the Demos and Equipment the night
    before it's showtime.  (Great Job under difficult circumstances 
    Steve...;-)
 
    John!  Yes.. Could you help do the Desktop ACMS demo.. Shows me
    the buttons to mouse and I take up a position as Demo Dolly.

    Customers start pouring in at 10:00am like the invitations say
    but the Simulcast is scheduled for 11:00 am local time.  Have a 
    nice talk with some customers about the future of computing, 
    positioning Middleware, remote database integration and HAL's 
    real birthday, Internet vandals, and remote access (you know the 
    usual crowd stuff)

    Then JACKPOT! Guy who claims to be VP for 60 million dollar company
    want's to talk distributed access.  Cheap front ends, first tier
    servers and then mainframe back end...Sounds like accessworks and 
    I told him all about it.. seemed impressed and gave me his card
    and I gave him mine. Damned if he wasn't a VP Sales for Powell!  
    I need to send a nice follow up letter to him and his MIS staff
    and get our Consulting team involved;-)

    THE BIG EVENT

    11:00 on the money Frank Bowden VP of Digital welcomed the 
    180 customers and 30 (or so) DEC(eh Digital) people to the 
    Announcement.

    The Simulcast event then kicked off like a beauty pageant with Rick
    Frazier and some anorexic Model doing talking heads thing, reading 
    cue cards and telling us what's to come.  

    Wide Screen TV in a darkened room were augmented by speakers and the 
    blinking lights of the PCs/Demo area.

    Russ G introduced Bob P and Bob pitched about each of our product 
    lines like the professional that he is:


    Client/SERVER -- Digital knows best the way to do it

    Microsoft  The PC/WNT business we do in addressing the desktop

    Alpha and  New Processors our second Generation Alpha processors
    VAXen      Follow ons and Statement there will be at least two
               more generations of VAX processors produced!
     
    OSF/1      We mean business with Unix 

    OpenVMS    For those Mainframe downsizing opportunities that Digital 
               really wants to go after

    Linkworks  (Bank of Montreal testimonial was OK but nothing tremendous)

    Bob handed back to Russ G who introduced the President of Cambridge 
    Technologies John Donovan who (according the praise heaped on by Russ 
    had full professorships in Pediatrics and Electrical Engineering)  

    The Doctor was good, very good, smooth and polished talking about the 
    continual change that all companies are being asked to undertake.  His 
    net take on all of was that we need to be moving to compartmentalized
    modular information systems (Client/Server) that can changed quickly 
    as the business needs of a company change.  If companies don't do that 
    and their IS strategy is out of phase with the business needs, they'll 
    go out of business.  

    His example of Walmart and Sears as competitors in the same industry 
    but Walmart's seeming low assets compared to SEARS could still buyout 
    their competitor (if they wished) because of MARKET CAP value(? need 
    to talk to a couple of my MBA buddies to understand this one) which 
    means Walmart is more profitable and has more profit potential than 
    SEARS does... Which translates into the price of the stock and how 
    much money a company is really worth...

    I'm sure a couple of the customers took something away from it, the 
    primary message was to remain as flexible as possible in their 
    IS strategy. And Client /Server was the way to do just that...

    Next Russ introduced Bill Strecker VP of engineering who detailed
    the points and products that Bob P had brought up...  Bill talked 
    about Alpha and the 300Mhz chip we are running in our labs for next
    year, OSF/1 -- With Digital Clustering Technology that we will 
    be porting to to.  OpenVMS and all the Mainframe downsizing we 
    will be doing with it. 

    And of course Linkworks 

    We broke from the Simulcast and the local event picked up with 
    some Corporate Consultant (with moderate speaking skills) began 
    by not introducing himself but saying he was from MA and doing 
    about the same presentation that Strecker had just done.  

    Whimsy then took him and he exclaimed that OpenVMS was 32bits and won't 
    become a 64 bit OS....  One gun, One Bullet, two Feet... One on top 
    of the other -- and the Final Jeopardy answer is "Who was The Jerk(tm)
    from corporate who came to the Dallas and shot OpenVMS in the head..."
    
    He was still floundering his way though the presentation when I had
    to excuse myself as I had an Alpha presentation to do at a SmartStar
    seminar at the ACT at 1:00pm

    THE SMARTSTAR SEMINAR

    I drove there, prepared my slides as I drove from B&W Postscript
    printouts I did on my Partner's Laser printer the night before. 

    It seems corporate didn't see fit to send the 15 or so True Type Fonts 
    they used with Power Point Oct 12th announcement kit/Netkit that I 
    had to steal from a salesman anyways.  
    
    No one with Laptop in the field had these fonts and corporate sent 
    these floppies with .ppt files to every one in Sales (I'm glad we've 
    got the presentations out...)  
    (The next day I acquired' a copy of the fonts... (A buddy had bought 
     them when he got his PC, so now I can see the .ppt files again...)

    I prepared for the SmartStar pitch and come in talking about Alpha,
    Same pitch, same presentation that the customers had just heard down 
    at the Infomart (as some of them beat me from the Infomart to the 
    SmartStar talk).

    You'd have thought I was talking about something else entirely. 

    Hardware, software, encapsulate the announcement for the folks and 
    what we're doing with Alpha and the additional life granted to the
    VAX family this day.  One distributor said they were holding off 
    buying 4100s cause they were thought they were dead... 
		
		They're going to buy 4100As now...
    
    And these people were AT the announcement but they got a different 
    story from me and MY same slides...

    The SMARTSTAR pitch went well but I still had to do DECUS that night,
    Two of the SmartStar Audience said they were coming to DECUS that
    night.
             (three times to hear the same thing?!? in one day?)

    I went and pulled together yet another "Different" slide set and 
    added some funny slides from someone's desktop Farside Calendar
    which I enlarged on the Xerox machine and put on overheads...
    (remember Zog and Gog on their TIMELOG(tm) in a downtown scene;-)

    Then I started to duplicate some of the Overheads (4up) for DECUS
    in less than 1 hour away...

    TUESDAY NIGHT DFWLUG MEETING

    DECUS that night had 70+ people >10 of whom had been at the announcement
    that morning. Paul Henderson (remember what a Great Saleman I said he
    was) was setting up softdrinks and popping popcorn for the meeting...
    
    He had also brought all the left over Wallstreet Journals and Announcment
    glossies they had left over at the Infomart too...

    Rumors of VAXen being discontinued abounded and permeated the crowd,
    during the social time before the start of the meeting.

    We began the meeting and raffled off two Door Prizes, the last of 
    my acquired marble Digital Paperclip holders (old logo;-) and began
    the meeting.

    We talked about The San Francisco Symposia in DECember, DECUS Classpass
    program ($1320 for any Digital Ed Service class (except HW and a handful
    of others when purchased though DECUS...).  

    Rex Jones (retired Digital Consultant) took five minutes to describe a
    generalized capacity tool that he was working on and looked for FT or
    interested sites.

    Then I was up.  My presentation was HW, all the OSes and futures as 
    described.  I borrowed from Dr Donovan's change presentation and 
    placed the theme as Change is a Glacier "Either you're on top of it
    or it drags you under"  and right now it's only 10 feet away from 
    your house...

    The crowd was heartened by the commitment of at least two new 
    generations of VAXen, They liked the 64 bit new file system and 
    Terabyte backup and restore in a single shift for OpenVMS and I 
    did my best to convince them of Digital's commitment to the OpenVMS 
    space  (using proof points and business reasons borrowed from some of
    today's talks)

    When I spoke of Standards and change, I moved to OSF/1 and the 
    addition of Digital Cluster technology to that OS, and of the SMP
    coming early next year. Several made notes about that...

    WNT and Native Netware on Alpha the Alpha PC also stirred some 
    interest.  Couple of folks asked questions about Netware running 
    Under OpenVMS or OSF/1 -- I said those products exist today from 
    TGV and other vendors  This would be Netware directly on the 
    Alpha chip (with PAL code...)..  Some thought this would be a 
    very good idea..

    Pathworks 5.0 and beyond seemed to scare several folks but I reassured
    that the change was primarily to come inline with the Microsoft desktop
    software.  We weren't losing the Pathworks APIs... the transport was 
    becoming modular...Easier to write and support (I hope:-)

    We wrapped up with some raw numbers (TPC-A, Specs and so on) and many
    in the crowd were just floored by the 1072 TPC-A numbers from Oracle,
    I made a hit with Rdb customers hinting that it's number would be 
    higher still..

    I closed on change, investment protection and commitment, referencing 
    the Rain.exe program that's found on one of the first DECUS symposia 
    tapes.  Rain.exe was compiled under Version 1 of VMS and now continues 
    to run (without recompiling and relinking under OpenVMS version 6.0.  
    
    I joked that I found out the program was a V1.0 program by testing it
    with Digital's VEST program trying to translate it to Alpha.  The VEST 
    complained that it couldn't translate a V1.0 program and I checked the 
    program's header sure enough, 1979...  

    If Digital could make a system that lets a small user program run without
    change for 14 years...  If you move to Alpha  Think how long your 
    programs will continue to run... Supported by Digital...

    It was a comforting thought to the crowd and I thanked them for taking 
    the time to listen to Digital's announcement (and me) (third time for 
    some;-)

    EPILOGUE:

    I talked about prospects with David Cathey, and Bill Johnson, two of 
    the best independant consultants in Dallas/(whole country) after the 
    meeting.  
    
    Bill is consuming what's left of the Polycenter Watchdog, VCS, and 
    DECalert product base and is trying to providing service to those 
    customers without having them migrate to another platform.  
    
    David Cathey is involved in FT of the OpenVMS Jensen server -- Neither 
    one of them could afford Alpha/Jensen priced over twice what an Alpha 
    300L is at (10k) both of them want to buy it...if the could.  
    
    We need a lowend lost leader Alpha PC...BAD..
    
    I drove home and still jazzed from the day logged into the Internet
    newsgroups on the DFWLUG BBS. comp.os.vms was alive with new messages 
    and I had just had my technical behind handed to me about a positive 
    POSIX and OpenVMS note I had placed there a couple of days ago.  

    It was too late to respond with justice to the the hostile customer so 
    I logged out, checked/recovered my sleeping children and went to bed.
    My wife had been asleep for quite some time.


    As I lay there in bed I wondered what tomorrow would bring,my 
    daytimer flashed in my frontal lobes unbiddened -- One ConCall, 
    Two sales calls and at night I get to try to build Cnews under 
    OpenVMS POSIX 

    -- Damn.. Sometimes Life just keeps gettin better and better... 
    
    Be seeing you
    
    John W.

  Nice note, John! You make it sound easy :-). What makes me feel good
  is that I know there were lots of other folks pulling just as hard. We
  won't let you down, I promise.

Re .12

Market Cap is short for Market Capitalization.

Market Capitalization is the total value of a particular company's stock on the
market.  Typically when one company buys another, the buyer gives (or exchanges)
its stock to the stockholders of the company being purchased.

What Donovan was saying was that WalMart could use a relatively small portion
of its stock to buy Sears.

You'll notice he didn't mention Digital's market cap.  Which last I knew was
around $5B.  

This is pretty pathetic when you consider the fact that Cisco Systems market
cap was recently calculated to be more than that. 

Cisco ended it's last fiscal year at approximately $670M compared to our last
fiscal year end of $14B.  Kinda perverse when you think about it.

The key difference is the growth outlook.  Cisco has shown growth rates in the
high 90% range for several years now.  Practically doubling every year for the
past three that I know.  We all know what Digital has done in the past three 
years.

    re .7

    	The Boston Globe also gave little mention to the event.  It
    regurgitated our press release the day of the event, but the next day
    there was not a word about it.

    	Now, I've had a Globe writer tell me that they know they are weak
    in high tech, but this is truly pathetic.  Every time Reebok or Stride
    Rite (2 local companies) hiccups, there are big headlines in the
    Business section, but the only time you hear about Digital (or Wang, or
    Wellfleet, or anybody) is when there's bad news.  You'd think that New
    England was still dominated by the shoe industry instead of high tech.

    	I hesitate to get involved, since I've had my hand slapped for
    talking to the press directly.  Who *is* responsible for getting the
    Globe to know what we do, anyway?

    		David

    well, the Globe knows that most of the people that buy newspapers wear
    shoes... :-)