4 Nov
2008
4 Nov
'08
2:40 p.m.
Contrast that with the sales approach by Intel, who
would sell to you
if they could hear the sound of change jingling in your pocket. I
could count on regular phone calls, literature and free lunches by
the local Intel sales guy--and we were definitely small potatoes. I
think Intel understood the idea of an architectural "lock-in" better
than DG or DEC, who apparently didn't think that principle applied to
microprocessors.
I don't know about DG, but I think that DEC had more basic issues than lack of
understanding of "lock-in". Come to think of it, they did understand that well
enough -- for computers, not chips.
DEC had microprocessors all right, but they were really just a way to build computers.
(The T11 is perhaps an exception; I sometimes wonder how that came about.) So they made
plenty of use of them internally, but the notion of selling them to outsiders just
didn't compute.
Another consideration is that DEC didn't take sales seriously in any setting --
witness the fact that they had the only sales force in recorded history that wasn't
paid commission.
As for the lack of success of Alpha in competing with x86, the above are good reasons, and
another one would be the fact that by then it was too late for a new general purpose
architecture. Now if Alpha had been positioned as an embedded architecture, it might have
succeeded (taking from MIPS) -- except that it probably was too fast for most embedded
applications.
paul