Conference ulysse::rdb_vms_competition

1149.0. "What Customers Really Want" by MSDOA::SECRIST (OSF/1 Silver on MIPS !) Mon May 18 1992 01:27

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Note 78.0                  What Customers Really Want                 No replies
MSDOA::SECRIST "OSF/1 Silver on MIPS !"              42 lines  17-MAY-1992 18:28
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	Perhaps TNSG should be interviewing our CUSTOMERS about 
	the direction of our information network instead of
	Digital employees; after all the declared goal is 
	near-term profitability.

	What they'd probably hear is that in the face of rapidly
	changing technology most customers would prefer a database
	that was based on standards AND was available on many
	platforms, with which general applications could be developed 
	on PCs and deployed for production use on big iron.

	Next they would hear that Digital can't fool them with all
	of this open, NAS rhetoric: today Digital's database
	strategy is married to a VAX, and tomorrow it's going to
	be married to an Alpha.  That's STILL the perspective of a
	closed-minded hardware vendor.

	Even though some customers acknowledge Oracle as a 
	technologically INFERIOR database to Rdb, they can 
	conceptually pick an application up from a VAX and move it 
	to another vendor's platform.  My customer does that with 
	Oracle, Informix, and CA/DB... but not Rdb or DBMS.
	Unfortunately many requests for proposals don't see the
	issue as an "information network." 
	
	Hopefully porting things to Alpha/OSF will be a stepping 
	stone to {Intel,Alpha}/NT and other platforms like MVS
	and SunOS if we truly have the vision to be a software 
	company.

	So just what is "The Open Advantage ?"  "Open" isn't bounded 
	by compliance to a bunch of standards.  The whole POINT of 
	so-called "open" systems is what you can DO with them.  I 
	never met a database system that WASN'T "proprietary," but you 
	hear customers accuse Rdb of that ALL OF THE TIME because it 
	is not what they want or MEAN when they say "OPEN."

	I hope TNSG is listening and considers these words in the
	redirection of our database strategy.

	rcs

I agree.  K.O. has been quoted a lot lately saying that we really are a mark-
eting company.  If that really is the case and he's going to allow our marketing
organizations to act like it, I hope we start doing sound market research.

I'm kind of tired of getting internal marketing questionnaires "please tell us 
by yesterday the ten most important features for version 3.5 of DECmumble..."

Let's get busy!

Bruce