Jean ... SUNW, in many ways, is really like the DEC of the 1970's!!!
... for the five years I worked at DEC from 1978 to 1983, sales were up every single quarter by greater than 30% over the comparable quarter in the previous year, and profits were up each and every quarter by over 40%.
... in 1979 or 1980, I hired a young engineering manager named Barry James Folsom, who proceeded to design DEC's Robin which in turn became the Rainbow, DEC's first PC ... I think that Barry is a CEO somewhere in Silicon Valley these days.
... so, in part, blame me, for DEC's fall from grace in the 80's <gggg>
... actually, one of DEC's biggest problems was the perception inside the company that because they had very little competition in the mini-computer space, that things would always be that way. Data General, and Hewlett-Packard were, as I remember, the only competitors of note, and they had only crumbs, relatively.
... Ken Olson (? Olsen - how quickly we forget) also believed that there would never be a use for a computer at home - that didn't help either.
... DEC also insisted on their own OS, and never embraced UNIX until they were in deep shit.
... interesting that the leading workstation company in the early and mid 1980s, Apollo Computer, which was loaded with ex-DECees from top to bottom, had the exact same problem ... insisting on a proprietary OS ... and got deleted by a small competitor called the "Stanford University Network."
... ah the memories ... DEC was a great place to work though ... lot's of hours, lot's of fun and lots of confusion - that matrix management system was entrepreneurial, but very inefficient.
Ken Wilson |
