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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (446002)	1/8/2009 12:23:02 PM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576346

To be fair, there are some similarities. For example, both do some of the best R&D in the industry, but don't seem to be able to capitalize on it often. IBM did great research...the Watson RC and the Almaden RC as well as some of the facilities in Europe were second to none for pure research...but much of it had poor commercial value, partly because IBM let these centers do their thing with little to no corporate guidance. But you think GM did (does) great R or even D? In the interest of full disclosure, IBM used to be far from my favorite organization. Understandable...particularly these days, IBM is a difficult company with which to do business. However, I will grudgingly admit that they are probably the best marketing organization the planet has ever seen. If DEC(marketing? What's marketing? We don't DO that here.) had a fraction of the marketing power of IBM, they'd still exist... Shhhh...don't tell i-node. He is in DEC's camp on that topic. Al

To: combjelly who wrote (446002)	1/8/2009 12:29:00 PM
From: i-node	Respond to of 1576346

If DEC(marketing? What's marketing? We don't DO that here.) had a fraction of the marketing power of IBM, they'd still exist... DEC was a horrid marketing failure, but that wasn't the only thing that did them in. The product line was not well-suited in the day of the PC. When VAX/11-780 hit the streets, we ordered 3 of them -- total cost in the low-millions, which was a lot for our company at that time. Before we could have BEGUN to recover that cost, our offices were packed with PCs and the VAXs were relegated to running batch jobs that could have just as easily run on our older minis. IBM had big iron and diversification at the time to pull them through; DEC didn't have this. IBM has done a great job with the AS400. But it is a limited market they already owned. DEC had a relatively small portion of the mini-market for commercial transaction processing, with the VAX & PDP series directed primarily at scientific users (other than the 11/70, which was oriented toward transaction processing).