Snopes on Ken Olsen

Tom> Yeah, this is silly. Ken Olsen was a great guy, but he was as Tom> human as any of us, and made mistakes. He probably yelled at his Tom> dog too. Clearly, DEC missed the boat. I can personally attest Tom> to the TOTAL CRAP JOB they did with the Rainbow. Tom> (I can't believe I'm making this capitalist argument, I hate its Tom> results :-) but it wasn't his place to "predict" the use of Tom> computers in the home, but to CREATE it, and DEC had as good a Tom> chances as any, though historically the entrenched make poor Tom> pioneers (but then there's IBM, so much for consistency). The underlying problem is that Ken had no clue about marketing, and even less about sales. DEC was successful for so long in large part because the products were so good they "sold themselves", and a "processor handbook" was all the marketing you needed. When that stopped being true, so did DEC. You'd find good marketing people from time to time at DEC, but good marketing as a high priority company activity just didn't exist. I didn't learn just how much you can get from good marketing until years after I left DEC. Similarly, consider the cluelessness of a CEO who absolutely refuses to consider commissions for salespeople. A comparatively smaller problems is that Ken couldn't stop himself person company. There are notorious examples where he personally redesigned products that were just weeks from release, causing large scale upheaval that delayed things for months (and, clearly, to no useful purpose). Consider the MMJ jack... paul