28 Dec
2017
28 Dec
'17
4:08 p.m.
On Thu, Dec 28, 2017 at 10:59:29AM -0500, Paul Winalski wrote:
On 12/28/17, Noel Chiappa
<jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
I think you're right. The disinterest in marketing and advertising
(Ken Olsen, and therefore DEC, had a "build it and they will come"
mentality) was one aspect of the corporate culture. An example of its
negative impact: When the Alpha EV5 came out, it was several times
faster than anything else around.
Got a reference for that performance claim? Wasn't that mid 1990's?
If so, I was heavily into benchmarking and performance work during
that period. If there was a processor that was 2x faster, let alone
several times faster, I would have noticed.
http://www.bitmover.com/lmbench/lmbench-usenix.pdf
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
From:
Paul Winalski
Lack of marketing skill eventually caught up to
DEC by the late 1980s
and was a principal reason for its downfall.
I got the impression that fundamentally, DEC's engineering 'corporate
culture'
was the biggest problem; it wasn't suited to the commodity world of computing,
and it couldn't change fast enough. (DEC had always provided very well built
gear, lots of engineering documentation, etc, etc.)
I dunno, maybe my perception is wrong?