Quote:
Originally posted by legion
I was kind of tongue-in-cheek about a curse. When Compaq took over DEC, it tanked. Same thing appears to have happened now with HP. I agree with you 100% LubeMaster77. The Alpha processor seemed to be designed to brag about how advanced it was, not to actually run any software.
I am of the opinion that most big mergers are a bad idea. They limit consumer choices; they make big and innefficient companies even bigger and more innefficient. The justification that a company needs to be bigger to compete is total BS...it's having a good product that matters. True, some smaller companies get shut out by predatory practices of bigger competitors, but I think that mergers of smaller and mid-size companies is generally okay. I think the types of mergers we've seen in aircraft production, airlines, telecoms, banking, cable, and oil (to name a few) have helped no one. They've provided some short-term hype and long-term problems.
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Friend of CB...
I've been assimilated twice.
DEC's curse wasn't so much hubris of the engineers. All engineers suffer from that! It was hubris o fthe managementent who believed, if you build it they will come.
Management that dismissed the PC. Management that had not killer instinct. DEC couldn't sell cool stuff because it didn't have commisioned sales folks. DEC couldn't sell AC in Saudi Arabia!
Software engineering struggled to move into the "windows" paradigm and was not sucessful. The joke was that any windows app prefaced by DEC like DECwrite or DECcalc sucked!
On the other hand, DEC made some the best engineered products hands down. The hardware was bullet proof. The enterpise software like the databases, operating system, networking, management and other infrastructure elements were, and in some cases like VMS still are the best in the world. A fe years ago, VMS showed up at DEFcon and was declared unhackable!
Don't believe the marketing crap you read everywhere. The people who use these products to move billions of dollars a minute like banks and the stock markets, or run air traffic control systems or manufacture Intel chips know that if the computer goes down, the business goes down don't use Unix, AIX, HPUX, LINUX, Windows Server... they use VMS.
I actually predicted that the Alpha chip would be the Omega of DEC... and it was. Too expensive to manufacture. Too hard to sell for a braindead directionless marketing organization.
But do not say that "The Alpha processor seemed to be designed to brag about how advanced it was, not to actually run any software." World record database benchmarks were set on the alphachip. Last year Tru64 UNIX on a 16 cpu marvel smoked a SUPERDOME running HPUX. That was not a politically correct outcome because HP didn't want to sell Tru64 over HPUX.
Carly was clueless in Cupertino!
We have a saying in HP. Pick the worst possible way of doing something. Dismantle the infrastructure and replace it. Now everyone suffers. "Thats the HP way." I kid you not.
The idiot believed that she could defy the odds. Only 1 out of something like 22 such mergers succeeded and that was some banking institution. Now its 1 out of 23. Freakin idiot didn't listen to anyone with an ounce of common sence. She screwed up big time and gets punished with a 21 million dollar paycheck. Now that's OBSCENITY!
- mark