Date: Tue, 27 Jan 1998 19:53:26 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: David Seifert <seifert@sequent.com> Cc: freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD/Alpha Message-ID: <29245.885959606@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 27 Jan 1998 15:46:38 PST." <199801272346.PAA04112@eng4.sequent.com>
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> I'm not speaking for Sequent, or visa-versa. I think you missed my fundamental point. I wasn't attacking Sequent's use of the x86, I was simply trying to make it clear that one's choice of a given architecture to back can't always be made on purely technical grounds. > > It's not so much where ALPHA is now that worries me, it's where it > > will be in 3-5 years. > > Ever hear of a self-fullfilling prophesy? Ah c'mon, as if this were the customer's fault... Digital could have buggered up a wet dream when it came to marketing and properly supporting any new technology they were trying to advance, and the ALPHA was certainly no exception. The marketing and general positioning for it was classic DEC "make the wrong moves, wait until just after the last minute to finally realize this and then do too little, too late about it", and there was never a united front that I could see behind making it an easy architecture for developers to support. This is not to say that I hate Digital - far from it - just about every machine I've ever really admired came from that company. It simply vexes me that there couldn't have been a lot MORE to my dealings with such a promising company over the years, the limitations on this generally being a direct result of various shortcomings in Digital's upper-level management. Olson, for example, was openly hostile to the whole workstation concept and his "there can be Only One OS and its name is VMS" attitude hardly helped the company's Unix strategy. Palmer, in turn, seems to have spent more of his time dodging falling masonry than in trying to articulate a workstation & server software strategy, and all the while you have these various DEC IBUs wandering around essentially rudderless on the whole issue. "Are we selling hardware? Are we selling software? Is that OS in competition with us or helping us? We don't know and the people up to don't know either." Perhaps the acquisition by Compaq will result in the right kind of shakeup in DEC's management structure, I don't know. One can only hope so. Jordan
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