10 Jun
2009
10 Jun
'09
11:34 a.m.
On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 1:02 PM, William Donzelli<wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
I never said VMS is dead - if I did, please point it
out and
acknowledge. I did say VMS is a "sinking ship".
You did. And it is (and I have made a lot of money on the ride down).
Not only is the market
share tiny and shrinking, but its installation base (number of
machines running VMS in production) is also shrinking. There are
pretty much no new VMS customers. VMS is speeding along to being
insignificant.
I saw that start in the late 1980s when DEC was at the "top of its
game"... we sold our products to DEC's customers, and when their
userbase stopped growing at the rate it had been at, our potential
market pool stopped growing, too. DEC kept making more money and
newer and faster boxes, but they were mostly selling them to their
existing customers as upgrades. Sure, folks were adding capacity all
over the place, but the number of physical installations essentially
stopped expanding 20 years ago, long before it obviously began to
shrink.
Try to think of as many new customers (not upgrades)
for the following
OSes (again, keeping the old names): AOS/VS, MCP, TOPS-10, TOPS-20,
OS/2200, VM, MVS, VSE, OS/400, Multics, PrimOS. Lets keep this to year
2009. I bet we can not even get to twenty.
New in 2009? I have no candidates (and the number does not go up for
'new since 1999').
I love VMS, but I don't see it as a growth industry. It's not
dead-and-gone, but neither is it thriving nor has it for a very long
time.
-ethan