Once in a while I can not resist talking
about VMS has being the worst marketed
product in history. It had a huge loyal
professional base, had the university market,
the military, factories, schools, lotteries,
stock exchanges, everything.
At one time I worked in the late 80s for
Ed Services. I asked what the educational
discount was for professors, and they said
NONE. In fact, when I worked for Fordham
they wanted $10K per license per machine.
They should have given schools VMS, professors
vouchers for some classes. In fact,
around that time they could have put in public schools VT Terminals on the teachers
desks, wired together to a uVAX II with an
LN03. All the teachers would have had email and phone, text editing, laser printing (including on transparencies), and it would have set a great example. Dec had billions of cash and it would have set the future.
Instead, places like Fordham said
VMS $10,000, Unix Free.
Customer complained that buying was so difficult.
At one time they had their sales force only focus on the top like 5%, and set the rest of the customers to 3rd party sellers that often sold IBM, SUN or other third party gear.
And, of course, smaller customers become
bigger customers. Satisfied customers tell a few people, unsatisfied customers tell at least 14 people and the complaints were the same, problem buying and overpriced licensing.
Then came the Alpha, which could and should have revolutionized everything. With an
Alpha and X Window terminals they could have
provided point and click interfaces managed buy only a few people. Instead they bought
a gazillion PCs and needed to support them.
So much CPU and computer were wasted as well in this way.
But it went from bad to worse. Instead of promoting VMS on their alphas, a better product with a huge margin, they were pushing NT on the Alphas. And, then Microsoft dropped NT.
Still, many sites tried to migrate from VMS, but could not reproduce the reliability of VMS Clusters and shadowing. Not to mention,
the ease of growth and the ability to perform upgrades while systems are up and running.
Oracle comes out with rack (sp?) computers that shares databases between systems. It simply is the VMS cluster management software.
It's so sad because rarely do we see products
designed for growth, a long period, reliability, flexibility of such quality. It also is newer than Unix.
And, Dave Custler was making PRISM, a WYSIWIG
version of VMS. They canceled the project, so he went to Microsoft and made NT. Early
beta versions sill had Digital error messages.
Palmer sold many of their best products, costing their customer great aggravation,
like the Polycenter Performance Suite. CA names their files for VMS following IBM
formats which is utterly confusing.
I would love to find another VMS shop again.
Available for consulting. Short phone calls are free.
Bob Coamrow
