Techie -
I've only been in houston for 4 years but several have claimed that the water here affects your brain. I was technical director, then CIO /VP operations for an MVS shop so I also have a little experience in mission-critical computing environments, but your points re well taken. But a couple of quibbles -
1. Don't forget that CPQ also bought Tandem, and that Tandem had nearly half as many employees as CPQ, all of them retained after the merger. CPQ today is a very different company internally than it was 2 years ago. Think of CPQ the box builder as 'classic compaq', which will be a small part of the total company both philosophically and in revenue in a few years.
2. Hate to correct you, but CPQ was the company that pushed SAP to port to NT in 1993-94, and they did it by establishing a major engineering presence in Waldorf and doing most of the port themselves. A guy named Peter-Mark Droste drove that effort for CPQ, he was an old friend of Paul Wahl and used the secret german handshake to get the deal. That's why CPQ has more than 50% of the SAP on NT business today, and had almost all of it for the first 2 years. You are reinforcing my point by saying applications create markets, that's why the outfit which drives the ISV community will end up with the lion's share of the market.
3. MSFT did in fact violate more than 200 DEC patents, primarily because Cutler took large chunks of the MICA operating system directly to NT. Still was not enough leverage to get MSFT to do a 64 bit NT port. I don't understand the point here - it's Intel and Merced that are making the value play happen.
4. Good point, and quite true. That's why they need to get an exclusive lock with MSFT, who DOES have the relationship with the developers.
And as to the ego issues, the merger team is run by John Rose (who left DEC after a bitter fight with Ken Olsen), Enrico Pesatori (who left DEC after a bitter fight with Bob Palmer), and Earl Mason (who Left Dec after a bitter fight with...) so there is probably at least a little bit of 'I told you so' going on.
BTW good article, but VMS was Cutler's 2nd OS, not NT. His first was the much loved RSX-11M which was one of the best real-time operating systems ever IMHO. I always have a little trouble with a journalist who gets one of his key assumptions wrong.
And thanks for the lively debate. |
