From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: kevin.bowling@kev009.com (Kevin Bowling) Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2017 17:45:03 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Why did PDPs become so popular? In-Reply-To: References: <109152082.5216233.1514413535270.ref@mail.yahoo.com> <109152082.5216233.1514413535270@mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: On Wed, Dec 27, 2017 at 5:07 PM, Paul Winalski wrote: > Not really, in my experience and from my perspective both as a DEC > customer and as a DEC development engineer. DEC's original customer > base were experienced research engineers and scientists who knew what > they wanted and didn't have to be sold to. That is the very definition of good market development and sales, and it is quite hard and never accidental. The marketing might not look like any marketing ever done before i.e. you don't take out TV spots to sell minicomputers, but showing research engineers your machine and your instruction set any chance you create might do it. Typically founders (or some equivalent like a GM or fellow in a technology company) are intimately involved, because they can hold the entire calculus in their working set, at least for a while. As a company grows and goes on, it becomes harder to fight people that thrive on the illusion of work and hubris instead of what the actual market is or what customers need that nobody else is giving them. > Someone (Scott McNealy?) once said to survive a computer company has > to be prepared to eat its own children. That is, to accept the > faster, lower cost technology as it comes along and not to try to > protect high profit margins on the older technology. Minicomputers > ate the floor out from under mainframes, and IBM lost market dominance > by attempting to protect the mainframe cost structure. PCs did the > same thing to minicomputers in the early 1990s, and DEC repeated IBM's > mistake by trying to defend against PCs instead of embracing them. That's a common view but I don't see it as black and white as a downward race. I see it more as entrepreneurs vying to reshuffle the deck, most customers (executives?, corporate governance?) don't really care that much about the specific technology they use but don't want to be seen as too conservative nor reckless. But there is opportunity to make a lot of money as a startup or technology company when you get technology to switch up drastically. If you can convince people to go back to timesharing on semi-proprietary equipment there is a lot of money to be made.. Amazon has done this marvelously and will have a nice 10+ year run yet doing that. Most developers enthusiastically using AWS don't think they were marketed or sold to either. Great market development and sales.