Digital Equipment Corporation founder and longtime CEO Ken Olsen died this week at 84. I never met Ken Olsen, but I have a sense of him through his products. The first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-1 accessed over an old TTY terminal from my junior high school. At one point in the 1980s I owned a PDP-8 I bought as salvage and installed in my California cellar. Not only did that old PDP-8 give me many hours of fun as I brought it back to life, it also heated my bungalow! So when I think of Ken Olsen, I think of industrial-strength computers.
Avram Miller did know Ken Olsen and has a recollection of Olsen here. But the most telling story about Olsen that Avram tells isn’t in his blog. It was about how he and Ken Olsen bought one of the first IBM PCs and disassembled it on a table in Olsen’s office.
“He was amazed at the crappy power supply,” Avram said, “that it was so puny. Olsen thought that if IBM used such poor engineering then Digital didn’t have anything to worry about.”
Clearly Olsen was wrong.
I find this little story very telling because it shows Olsen in 1980 very much stuck in the late 1960s when it came to what mattered and what didn’t in a computer. Yes, having a robust power supply was good for computer reliability, but not as important as having a great operating system and applications. But that’s not the way Olsen saw it. In a world that had to that point been dominated by computer companies building expensive products aimed primarily at engineers, he simply had no concept of a computer as a consumer product.
No wonder Olsen and Digital together pretty much missed the personal computing revolution. They thought robustness was a prime virtue and that the market would not only wait for it, but would pay a premium for it, too. Fat chance.
Practically from that moment when Olsen and Miller had the IBM box apart on that table, Digital peaked as a company. Yes, readers will comment that the Rainbow 100 was great (though I don’t remember it as being so) or the Professional line was, well, very professional, but the computing market had already moved past professionalism and into the mainstream when those boxes were introduced only to fail.
Olsen lasted as Digital CEO for another 12 years and to be fair the company had another chance to succeed after Olsen’s departure, but again they blew it.
In the early 1990’s DEC was quietly becoming a PC network powerhouse. They finally figured out what companies with thousands of PC’s needed and were slowly building a family of products. Sure Novell was the powerhouse during this time, but I think DEC had a better enterprise perspective. Their wide area networking was mature and they were in a better position to support TCP/IP than others. Towards the end DEC’s networking group was their only growth division and was very profitable.
Then CEO Robert Palmer (Olsen’s successor) severely cut the networking division’s budget. DEC had a window of opportunity to become a major force in the PC and network industry and Palmer killed it. DEC could have been Cisco. Instead, he put all of DEC’s marbles into their Alpha (AXP) development, another hardware platform. It was the same kind of mistake that Olsen had made before him. Digital didn’t sell enough AXP systems to keep the company afloat.
DEC had a lot of employees. In any given market DEC usually had at least twice as many people in its branch offices than either IBM or HP. They had armies of folks back at HQ too. Most companies find a way to measure the value of their employees. In sales i its easy, value can be determined by how much you sell and how much profit the company makes from your efforts. In product groups you can determine how much profit is created by your product. By the size of their workforce I don’t think DEC gave enough attention to the value each person was bringing to the company. When DEC ran out of money, the fall was big and painful. It was hard to watch. Years later when I meet former DEC employees a common thread of discussion is on how badly the business was managed.
While Ken Olsen invented the mini-computer and started DEC, in the end it was not a sustainable business simply because of bad management.
Simply being smart is not enough.
When Olsen relinquished control it was already too late.
I think you mean ‘Ken’, not ‘Len’ somewhere near the top.
Fixed, thanks.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Robert X. Cringely and Arjan Waardenburg, Mike Farney. Mike Farney said: Memories RT @cringely: Ken Olsen and Post-Industrial Computing: DEC founder and longtime CEO Ken Olsen died this week http://bit.ly/g2Dnbs […]
I think that this ZDnet article gives a far better perspective on Ken Olsen and DEC than your sound byte drivel!
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/rip-ken-olsen-pioneer-of-interactive-computing/10019
That’s a great column and describes aspects of Olsen and Digital (not DEC) that you’ll find well-covered in my million-word archive. But he misses my whole networking point, doesn’t he? These are complex topics that every writer will address in a different way. I guess I just choose to use sound bytes.
Ok, thanks for the reply!
In that article, Digital and DEC are used interchangeably to refer to the company.
And Intel and Microsoft are making the same mistakes today re: tablets and phones, that DEC made in 1980. All the dismissive comments about what the tablet can’t do and that people actually care about those things…. The MS foil deck stating the iPad doesn’t have a “searchable file system” while Windows does is a prime example.
Microsoft and Intel are very much aware of tablets. Microsoft launched two phones last year alone and is porting Windows to the ARM processor.
I would say Dell is a company that is more like DEC and very unsure what direction they will be taking.
I think your missing the point being made here. Just as Olsen pointed out how crappy the IBM PC was, MS is pointing out how crappy the iPad is because it does not have a searchable filesystem.
I challenge you to find an iPad/iPhone user that cares about the device’s filesystem.
-Sean
True, but the non ipad/iphone users do care.
Your observation on DEC’s employee over-population dovetails with my own experiences with DEC in the latter half of the 80’s. I worked inside the “VAX Division” at IBI – a relatively large 4GL ISV. I thought DEC’s OS (VMS) was actually superb (if their computers were as cool as Apple’s, they might have been forgiven their proprietary mindset) and we did a lot of very good work. …but there was a moment in time where I can recall sitting in meetings in Maynard and realizing that DEC decisions and employee motivations were driven by internal politics and unnatural, over-developed internal processes – it was not just the fact that the organization was bloated – it was that their mindset was self-referential to the extent that customer requirements and competitive threats became secondary to internal hoops and milestones. The writing was on the wall in the 80’s. Even at the time, I remember flashing to a chapter from Tribes on the Hill by J. McIver Weatherford that attributed the defeat of the Mayans (?) by the Conquistadors (who were outnumbered by 10,000 to 1) to the fact that Mayans had become more concerned with securing human sacrifices than killing enemies – since they assumed they would always win, they went to great lengths to avoid killing enemies so that they could feed their internal machine. IBM and Microsoft have dodged this bullet (so far) – but Sun did not (I worked a lot with Sun too and they had the same decaying stench). It’s got nothing to do with open source or other technical/religious decisions in particular -its a presumption of victory and it doesn’t just kill products (or destroy artifacts in the case if Mayans), it kills the culture.
Sebastian (2:08pm above), now I want to go read about the Mayans!
I found your comment to be very insightful and educating.
It puts logic behind my fear of working for a company like Microsoft (or even Apple these days) where I suspect my work would be hobbled so the company can make more money selling upgrades and support.
you wrote about the Mayans:
“Tribes on the Hill by J. McIver Weatherford that attributed the defeat of the Mayans (?) by the Conquistadors (who were outnumbered by 10,000 to 1) to the fact that Mayans had become more concerned with securing human sacrifices than killing enemies – since they assumed they would always win, they went to great lengths to avoid killing enemies so that they could feed their internal machine.”
Wow! Like he said!
Like you, I was intrigued by comments on Aztecs. Turns out that Tribes on the Hill by J. McIver Weatherford is mainly about the U.S. Congress and its culture.
I found the following book to be much more interesting in regard to Aztecs.
Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control By Ross Hassig
I think that you mean the Aztecs, not the Mayans. And, in addition to Aztec hubris, Cortes had the aid of tribal allies and smallpox.
you’re right about the Aztecs – i knew it sounded wrong when i wrote it (thus the “?”) – but I was refering back to a book I read in 1983… To be honest, i have forgotten a lot more important things than that over the past 25 years. … thanks for the correction
Tribes On the Hill goes into some good detail on (Aztec) battle strategies, weapon design, etc. all of which had been optimized to capture prisoners for later sacrifice versus securing victory on the battlefield. Politics and immunology aside – there is a strong argument that ultimately it was their twisted mission that did them in.
I always thought it had something to do with the fact that the Spaniards had guns and had enough sense to stay out of hatchet range. Seriously though, the natives were operating under the delusion that these guys were the return of Quetzalcoatl and by the time they figured out the truth it was too late. They literally kissed the feet of the Spaniards.
@michael
“drivel” ? – well the ZDNet article says much the same about DEC misfiring over PCs:
“What DEC missed — what Ken Olsen missed — was the rise of the PC. Somehow, DEC just didn’t get that the PC was the new face of computing. The minicomputer market was failing and DEC didn’t — and never would — have a viable product offering.”
That article claims that the Alpha has an enduring legacy in current ARM designs – I’m unaware of any specific deep influence after the StrongARM of the late 90s and the intervening decade has seen a lot of exciting change in ARM. But I’m not going to toss around a word like “drivel” …
While drivel might be a bit strong…
We all know DEC failed and we mostly know why, so how about focusing on what it (DEC) contributed to our industry.
The PC is obviously one of Ken Olsen’s biggest mistakes. Despite it DEC could have survived as a business without a PC. They didn’t because of a long list of mistakes. They could have had Novell, Microsoft, and Cisco’s network market; but they blew it. They could have had IBM/Lotus and Microsoft’s email market, but they blew it. They could have had IBM, HP, and Sun’s UNIX market; but they blew it. The list goes on and on. The PC is just one item on it.
Lets not forget OSI vs TCP/IP. DEC half heartedly supported TCP/IP. The future was in OSI, or so they thought. In the meantime IBM and HP were retooling big time and going to TCP/IP.
Good management thrives when most variables are known. Schools teach this and graduate managers in the thousands. But one cannot simply learn the vision and drive needed to create something from nothing. And yet these are the qualities needed by any company faced with obsolescence. Any managers unfortunate enough to find themselves in such a situation are almost incompetent by definition. Were this not so, we would expect to find scores of companies such as Nokia, whose humble origins have nothing to do with telecommunications.
AltaVista the first really good search engine was invented at DEC. There were clearly smart and visionary people working at DEC. As a customer I saw a lot of good product ideas die a quick and ugly death when they reached the executives at DEC. DEC could have been an Internet powerhouse. They missed that boat too.
John’s quite right, AltaVista was a very promising software division within DEC, not only with their new-fangled Internet Search Engine, but with AltaVista FireWall and several other products. They also had the best multi-vendor support organization; I regularly subscribed to incident support packs through DEC MVS. And don’t forget DLT, which revolutionized tape backup. When Compaq came in and bought it up, and subsequently started selling off or closing pieces, it was sad to watch. Without DEC, there was no Alpha, and we were all consigned to a slow, second-rate chip architecture for a decade…
But didn’t Alta Vista come over to Digital from Xerox PARC with Bob Taylor? Which company really deserves credit?
Don’t forget Louis Monier, later wen on to help develope Cuil (the search engine that was just cool!).
Alta Vista came from two, cooperating Digital research labs in Palo Alto. It did not come from Xerox PARC.
12th. Beat you again Robert Young!
I beat both of you.
The public accounting office where I worked many moons ago used to have a mini computer with one overworked operator and an outside tech. Then the office went to a local area network (with Internet access) operated by a network manager (one of the accountants) along with the individual accountants and secretaries.
One of the saddest days at work was when our mini computer tech lost his job due to the changing marketplace for computers. Sure liked that guy.
By the way, Bob, how is the second phase of Cringely’s Startup Tour coming along? Can we look forward to seeing the interviews on TV soon?
Look for a big Startup Tour announcement next week.
Ah come’on. We’re all friends here. You can tell us here. We won”t tell anyone.
Olsen, it turns out now, was right. Folks don’t have computers in their homes, they have appliances with embedded cpu’s. Lotus 1-2-3 started the transition from “personal computer” to “personal device”. Webiness just magnifies the fact. More and more of the usual pundits are figuring out that cloud and such is a re-invention of Multics, and the PC is just a terminal.
No, Robert, you handsome devil. My PC isn’t just a terminal. When something happens to render the cloud no longer accessible or secure, I will still have all my files on the old fashioned PC sitting on my desktop.
Of course, retired people probably look at life differently than active youngsters or working adults.
Who said you were normal? iPad, iPhone, and the like are the future. Just terminals. The PC is dead, dead, dead. Embedded programming is ALIVE!!!!!!!!
My iPhone and iPad also work fine offline. (Lucky given I’m on AT&T — zing.)
Wow, Robert. You’re confusing apples and oranges. For example, iPad, iPhone, and the like aren’t terminals, they’re communication devices. If I want to create a spreadsheet, write a program, or design a movie with CGI, I don’t want a communication device, I want a computer.
My microwave oven uses embedded programming, but I don’t think I could use it to prepare designs for a home remodeling job. Do you?
Sorry. I’m crazy. I was drinking the mead again.
“Olsen, it turns out now, was right. Folks don’t have computers in their homes, they have appliances with embedded cpu’s.” That got me thinking… whether or not something is a computer depends on how it is used. If you program it and it runs your program, it’s a computer. If you just run someone else’s program, it’s an appliance with an embedded cpu.
Thank you.
IBM planned 2,500 PC/annum, based on the “computer” semantics. And they were right, until 1-2-3 came along. That’s when the transition started, and made Bill very rich. A handful of gurus might write personal programs for iStuff (and clones), probably as many as write code for their car’s controller (allegedly Intel chips run Fords).
If you read up on Multics, what you find is cloud, albeit not as extensive of course. With AJAX taking over, the things at the other end are just terminals. That they have some local storage isn’t that much different from a 3270, which does and executes some local code. There’s a lot of argument these days about how bad html/js is for creating active screens, rather document displays. D’oh. Talk about grasping the obvious; writing js to manipulate hundreds of innerHTML. This is what happens when committees take over.
IBM, just as Olsen, looked at the PC as a “computer”, a device to be programmed by the user in some 3GL to solve the user’s computation problems. 1-2-3 changed that, forever.
For its midrange line of computers IBM invested a lot in business applications and cultivated a vast network of third party developers. If you didn’t want to be a computer guru and/or write your own code, they could give you a huge catalog of applications that you could buy and a turnkey computer to run them on.
DEC on the other hand would give you a list of programming languages you could use to write your own stuff. The number of “applications” that were offered for VMS was a small fraction of IBM’s offerings. Hence the reason the AS/400 iSeries is still here today and doing quite well on an inferior operating system, while VAX and VMS is no where to be found.
IBM understood that applications could sell computers, just like 123 sold PC’s. DEC had more of a “if you build it they will come” attitude.
Actually, I believe VisiCalc begat all spreadsheets, and as such the PC revolution.
Still, I now seem to be dealing daily with at least three computing devices, and the hassle and frustration (nay, impossibility) of syncing my various data repositories may force me into the Cloud despite severe misgivings. Old Chinese saying: Man with two watches never knows what time it is.
Yes, the historical revisionists here do tend to ignore the first serious spreadsheet application was for the Apple //, not a PC.
Actually, VisiCalc was offered to DEC first. Dan Bricklin wanted to put the product on a DEC minicomputer before it was targeted at the AppleII.
http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/visicalc-origin-bricklin.html
The DEC Professional 380 was my first “real” computer. My second was a Macintosh II. You can see the diverging trajectories of the two pioneers, right there in those two computers.
Ken’s observation about the power supply is just what you’d expect from a guy whose company started out making power supplies.
If he knew anything it was power supplies.
Your commentary on Olsen reminded me of John F. Akers , IBM CEO.
Is the urban legend true that Akers had an IBM PC on his desk that he refused to turn on?
Not quite the tribute Ken Olsen deserves. Yes, mistakes were made, he chose the wrong fork in the road a couple of times. But, along with Edward Johnson of Fidelity, Ken Olsen was, without question, the most important business leader in New England in the past 50 years. Just try to imagine what the economic landscape of Massachusetts would look like today if Olsen had not started DEC. The “Massachusetts Miracle” was Ken Olsen.
I simply love it when you show me “the other side of the coin”. I remember the Alpha’s from my Grad School days. I thought they were decent enough, but I liked my SGI Indigo2 more. Remember, this was before you could get a Pentium processor. Once that came out, the game changed for us Engineers (that Pentium processed data faster than the giant VAX we had, which was critical).
I was a customer of Dec through the late 80s and early 90s. We built our network on Pathworks, developed with Microsoft, which morphed pretty nicely into the AXP/NT platform for our network. I think the demise came from within. I spent a lot of time in DEC training, and one of the long-time instructors I became acquainted with put it this way:
“I used to drive to the office in the morning, and I couldn’t wait to get to work – I love my job and the company environment. In 1993, it all changed – thank you Robert Palmer. The company doesn’t love itself anymore. Now I drive to work in the morning and all I can think about is getting out of this company and doing something else”
That was the sad demise of DEC
Hi Bob:
Just one thing I’d like to add to an interesting article:
You might want to mention the great irony that it was, (IIRC) Dave Cutler of DEC, who wrote most of the initial code of Windows NT. Some say that parts of NT (and therefore parts of Widnows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7) were literally line for line copies of …VMS was it? Yeah, something like that.
Someone please clarify what I’m trying to say.
Brad
As a former member of the hardware engineering team for the VAX 9000 (at one time a water cooled ECL multi-processor mainframe– another example of the armor plated overkill hardware mentality, but I digress), part of the Cutler story
was in the name of Windows NT itself:
VMS -> WNT when you increment each letter of VMS by one.
At our campus in Marlboro, MA, there was a sort of affection for Olsen that was
felt by almost all employees, although by 1990 many were becoming increasingly
critical of his hands-off, let-internal-competition-between-groups-decide
management style at a time when there was clearly a revolution in computing
underway. No one liked Palmer, who was referred to by the rank
and file as “GQ Bob” for his flashy manner of dress– in stark contrast to
the avuncular Ken…
Rupe
http://everything2.com/title/The+similarities+between+VMS+and+Windows+NT
I was involved in a rather eye opening study in the late 1980’s. We had a few hundred engineering programs written in fortran that we ran on an IBM mainframe. The cost to our engineering department was mounting and I led a study to find a more economical platform. We looked at VAX/VMS. Converting the software to that platform was going to be pretty trivial. The cost of an appropriately sized VAX was about $120,000. Then I learned about Paradox/386. It was based on Phar Lap technology. One could buy a special fortran compiler, create 32-bit code, and run it on a DOS PC in protected mode using their DOS extender technology. It worked beautifully! On a $6000 386 PC with a 387 math coprocessor, we could get the same compute power as that VAX or a good sized IBM mainframe. That stunned us. The raw computer power of the PC had already reached mini-computer levels. The world was changing and given Moore’s law, it was going to keep changing fast. Soon there would be no reason for an engineering department to have any centralized mini or mainframe computer.
While Digital got squeezed out by the PC, it’s worth noting that they were in the game pretty early on; when they came out with the Rainbow they hedged their bets by making it capable of running either of the two budding operating systems of the time, CP/M and MS-DOS. That seemed like a good idea at the time.
Olsen foresaw the coming of networking; his catchphrase in the late 80’s was “the network is the system”. (This was about a decade and half before Sun paraphrased it into “the network is the computer”).
I always felt the conventional 20/20 hindsight with respect to Olson and Digital was that they had the best technology but tried to keep everything proprietary for too long; by the time they embraced open systems, it was too late. I can remember in the early ’90s having to buy TCP/IP software from another company – TGV where hast thou gone? – just to get our Vaxes (Vaxen for you purists) onto the Internet.
How does this scenario relate to Apple, circa 2011 ? Compare and contrast..
Bob: you’re not allowed to do eulogies any more.
[…] sans vouloir se diversifier sur le service comme l’ont fait IBM ou Oracle. En 1981, Olsen a démonté un IBM PC et a trouvé que ce dernier était si mal conçu que Digital n’avait pas grand chose à […]
Maybe Olsen wasn’t aware it was a switching power supply. Old power supplies used to have large transformers. When the switching power supplies came out, they had puny transformers, but the delivered more wattage, less heat and more accuracy and they were 1/5 the cost ! I remember looking at an old power supply on a lab bench, no comparison.
Sure, they’re smaller and slightly more efficient in terms of power usage, but not better in terms of reliability. 30 years ago I installed a lighting system using 50 old fashioned ballasts. They all still work as good a new. My wife recently bought a new style fluorescent fixture for her fish tank and the ballast had to be replaced already. And don’t get me started on the electronically controlled motors now used in rooftop air conditioners and washing machines just to replace a single capacitor with dozens of solid state devices and several larger and less reliable capacitors. When it fails in a few years, you have to buy the whole motor.
I like to cut Ken some slack about the “computers in the home” thing. I remember ads from Apple and Ohio Scientific from that time and they talked about how your computer could turn the lights in your house on and off and stuff like that. Most people don’t have computers in their home, but in their home offices instead. So they have an office computer – the real home computers were a fad that died in the late 1980s, with Commodore holding the torch a little longer.
One weird aspect of the whole DEC story is that in the Soviet Union and friends PDP-11 clones had the role that the IBM PC did in the rest of the world. Looking at demos of those old models feels a bit like seeing an alternate reality.
The Computer History Museum has a short documentary about DEC’s first efforts to enter the PC market with its own technology (the phase before the Rainbow and variations):
https://www.youtube.com/computerhistory#p/u/31/YKbnbvF_2Ew
Cringe,
I have been reading your columns since they were in smudgy ink. I have been in the valley floating with the foam since the late sixties, I worked in semiconductors, when 8 transistor op amps were big, left process R&D when I fell in love with 8 bit PCs, and ended up at DEC. There, I did ‘AI’, Unix, and VMS, when I noticed that DEC did not get “personal computers”, got a bit disillusioned in ’87 and went to Apple. this was during the bad period, but still a rush, online in the 90’s, consulting with Sony in Europe (they had all the pieces for iTunes plus community with 250K people, and would not adopt it), startups – been there, failed.
My time at DEC was special. I met Ken a few times. The company had a magic I will never forget and will always be grateful for. Different then Apple, but in some ways more genuine.
It was engineering and quality driven. I really experienced a deep customer commitment in the field I have not seen since. There was a love for the technology, for what it could do throughout most of the company. It had magic!
But there were disconnects in middle and upper management – when companies get big, this happens. Power struggles, ego centric strategies that hurt the overall goals. This was exactly what I saw rampant at Apple in the late 80’s and early 90’s, before Steve came back.
There was a loss of focus on product and customers.
I think the Ken Olson’s quote concerning personal computers is misquoted. He was looking at the applications cited – recipes, opening doors etc. He was correct in that. However, he did not understand consumer opportunity, he was an engineer first. And in the end, he was too nice a guy to enforce the discipline needed. This is, where Steve Jobs is really awesome – not being the nice guy, when it counts. Driving through the vision.
Although it saw itself as a hardware vendor, it really was the software that provided DEC’s core strength, tightly integrated with the hardware. Virtual Memory, clustering, networking, integrated development languages and environments – they were all there early, and they were rock solid, making early Unix look like “Snake Oil” at the time. You rarely rebooted a Vax…
A time long gone… but Ken provided a basis of what was possible, without him, CPM, DOS, NT, and maybe OS X would not look the same.
Thanks, and RIP
I imagine that the dinosaurs didn’t think much of the little
furry mammals running around their feet, but when there was a
large and sudden shift in the environment, it was the little
animals that were able to adapt to the changes.
I worked at DEC in an engineering group during the mid-1980s.
Someone brought in an early Macintosh and I recall talking to
a colleague who was fiddling with MacPaint at the time. I
asked what language compilers it had and was told there were
none. I asked about database packages and got a similar
answer. At that point I dismissed it as an expensive toy, not
a “serious” computer. After all, I was working with minis and
mainframes that cost thousands, if not millions of dollars,
and that were used by dozens and even hundreds of people.
In those days DEC was the second largest computer company in
the world, and our sights were set on IBM, still ten times our
size. It was hard to see these little eight- and sixteen-bit
machines as any kind of serious threat. Of course with the
benefit of 20-20 hindsight it’s easy to see their inevitable
domination of the computing industry as they grew cheaper and
more powerful.
The key to understanding how DEC missed the PC revolution is
to recall that at his core, Ken Olsen was a hardware engineer
whose origins were rooted in the early days of radio and the
era of tubes. The values of quality design and reliability
engendered by that beginning sadly did not serve as well in a
computing world where hardware was becoming a cheap commodity
and the main focus was moving to software. DEC was an
engineer’s company, run for engineers. A rare thing then, it
is even rarer today.
The important thing to remember is that Ken Olsen’s work on
the TX-0 inspired his vision of personal computing, which was
realized in commercially successful products such as the
interactive timesharing of the PDP-10 line and standalone
machines like the PDP-8. In turn, exposure to these products
directly influenced Bill Gates, Gary Kildall, Steve Wozniak,
and many others who created the modern personal computer
industry. Ken Olsen is one of the giants on whose shoulders
today’s technology leaders stand, and his contribution to
computing should not be underestimated or forgotten.
Bob – Having spent 4 painful years at Digital – 1992 to 1996, as the plane was on fire and dropping like a stone – I agree with your original article, but don’t think you went far enough. Reading through the article and the comments, I would put Digital’s decline down to three different issues but interlocking issues.
(1) Spending Money on the Wrong Thing – First, Digital did do IBM-style PCs. Most people seem to have forgotten that DEC built 386 and 486 PCs and PC servers. They actually spent a lot of time and effort getting into this business just as Dell, Compaq, and HP were driving competitors out of the door. In other words, DEC got into PCs in a big way just as the business was consolidating and prices were being driven to commodity levels. Kind of a classic strategy fail – don’t join a technical party late with also-ran products, right?
(2) Not Spending Money on the Right Thing – Second was (as discussed) networking. my take is instead of putting all that money into PCs, DEC could have bought a number of the key network companies in their Route 128 “back yard” (Wellfleet, Cabletron, whatever). After all, DEC had their own gigabit switches in the mid-1990’s, but with the rest of the business declining and no strategic vision, nobody was buying them. Had they focused on Networks in the early 90’s and not PCs, they wouldn’t have missed the “launch window” for becoming one of the dominant resellers of Ethernet switches; a tough outcome for the company that helped invent networking (the “D” in DIX stood for Digital, after all).
(3) Not Being Able to Change When Change Was Needed – Last but likely the biggest was not properly reading the change in the market for mini-computers, which funced everything. I watched KO get kicked out by Robert Palmer, and thought “How is this supposed to work – replacing the original “idea” guy with a “chip” guy, just as INTEL was doing to CPUs what Dell was doing to PCs?” Perhaps KO could have become Chairman and not get shown the door? And what about the “fails” in the Alpha (which I assume were Palmer’s responsibility)? The Alpha was setup to be unique from a codebase standpoint (compiler-dependent optimization, at least for the earlier CPUs – meaning you couldn’t just recompile from SUN OS or HP-UX and get going; and no 32-bit standard word? *wow*). The Alpha was a great technical design that was out-of-step with the market; it came out just as customers were moving from “build” to “buy”, making it a tough target for 3rd-party developers. And once DEC sold off rdb, they lost what was left of both their pissed off Ultrix AND VAX developer base, and in my opinion any chance of redemption. Perhaps DEC could have bought their ACE partners – SGI and MIPS, which would have given them lots of UNIX cred as well as allow them to merge the Alpha and MIPS teams and avoid the whole fight after. As others have said, lots of opportunites for things to have turned out differently.
Was there anything positive about DEC in those years? Sadly yes. I could see just how good a company they had been, at least in terms of engineering and ideas, and how excellent their people still were (not the managers). That much I attribute to KO, and still have a soft spot for him because of all the stories I heard of the “old days” of the 70’s and 80’s. I think the question back to you, Bob, is how could someone like KO – who arguably conceived of the whole mini-computer industry in the late 1950’s – have lost his way so thoroughly? or is 30 or so years the most you can expect? (Might explain why Bill Gates left the building).
_Former Digit_
[…] is another example of not being able to see beyond the nose on your fact. Cringely has the story. Here is the link. I liked this quote There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his […]
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