Conference 7.286::digital

    See http://techweb.cmp.com/nc/713/713f1NT.html for a comparison of NT
    on Alpha and PPro in Network Computing.

oh, dear...

>>  For his part, Deskstation CEO Don Peterson still prefers RISC,
>>  parti-cularly Digital's Alpha, to Intel's offerings. But he can't say
>>  the same about Digital. The demand for Alpha is "out there-we're seeing
>>  three times the demand this year vs. last year, and we had three times
>>  last year over the year before that," he noted. "But Digital is making
>>  it less and less attractive for us to expend R&D dollars on this. They
>>  seem to be putting land mines in our path, and I'm getting tired of
>>  trying to dodge 'em."


why, does this come up *every* year,month, day???

the company motto should be :

Digital : We have a great product, just try and get it off us!

> why, does this come up *every* year,month, day???

It must come up often enough that you now assume Digital is always doing
something wrong.

From the article Peterson seems to complain about two things, one is that
by us putting FX!32 out there, it makes it less attractive for some people 
to port applications to NT/Alpha. His second complaint seems to be around
us trying to bring lowercost CPU's to market. The article makes it sound
like our work on low cost CPU's is interfering with our high end work. I
can tell you this is not true.  We have faster EV56's and EV6 coming to
keep Alpha as the fastest �processor.

Peterson never mentions anything about Digital not being willing to sell
Deskstation the fastest processors we make.  Just that he has a problem 
with out attempts to get Alpha into a lower cost desktop market.

-Bruce

hmmmm...interesting you say this...

In Australia, the ESF (Enterprise Sales Force) held a kick-off recently, and 
one of the items was a workshop, where feedback was given about how 
effective Digital is to the client base. The feedback, said that Digital is 
too difficult to do business with.. and remember that this was from the 
sales force.. and guess what.. the sales force said that this was the same
for th previous year, too.

so, my comment stands, Digital is perceived as being difficult to do 
business with. This is an age old problem, that this company has... I don't
know what needs to happen to change it, but I know it has to change for us 
to not only survive, but grow.

regards,

	Paul. (i feel like a veteran, and I've been in the company 10yrs)

> the Digital Alpha AXP 21x64

Can't even get the name right...

PJDM

        
    With the 
    
    - wierd names we come up with ("Polycenter Manager on Netview for
    Windows NT" is a great example) 
    - let internal project names get used publically and make in in front 
    of the press/customers (the cowboys on horse picture that flashes up on 
    the 4100 (rawhide) alphabios console must cause a LOT of headscratching) 
    - and then keep changing names ("VMS services for ms-dos" to "Personal 
    computing systems architecture" to "Pathworks" (this of course is part 
    of our "stealth marketing" program - once we get some name recognition,
    we change the name!))
    
    ... its not surprising that internal and external people can't get names
    straight! We need a clean, consistant, family and product naming
    strategy that is well thought out! 
    

The "AXP" was dropped a long time ago. Not only do internal people still use it 
(look in the UNIX and Windows NT conferences) but external people who should 
know better and who we should have told by now (.0, Microsoft) still use it as 
well. This is indicative of our complete lack of marketing and advertising 
skills: every week I open the Saturday newspaper to find a Pentium advertisement 
staring me in the face, and we can't even get experts to get our secret chip's 
name right.

We do have clean, consistent, family and product naming strategies: we get new 
ones all the time.

OSF/1 -> Digital UNIX: probably a good move
VMS -> OpenVMS: worst move ever
PATHWORKS was almost called LANWORKS
LinkWorks: which one was that?
AnythingWorx: huh?

Alpha[Station|Server] type gen/MHz fell over straight away with the 190MHz 
AlphaServer 2100 4/200, and has been going steadily downhill ever since. People 
generally tell me the 4 means 4 CPUs.

Lots of others manage to get away with what look like internal code names (HP's 
Snake, Sun's Ultra, HP/Intel's Merced, Intel's P7 (mentioned in .0), Microsoft's 
Cairo/Daytona/Chicago), but we run scared. Wonder why. Do we refuse to tell 
customers about our wonderful CPU future because we're not allowed to tell them 
the code name, and the marketers haven't decided if they're going to call this 
one 21164 as well "so as not to confuse anyone"?

PJDM

    
    re: -.1
    
    You forgot one:  SortaWorks

When our intranet is running well, we have a network. 
When its not, we call it the Notwork.

 - Josh

PATHWORKS was actually LanWorks for long enough that we even shipped a product
that way and had to re-release it when the trademark issue surfaced.

Always, Always, ALWAYs, do the most exhaustive possible trademark search!

Eirikur

    The Digital NT "Monkey Business" print ads started running in this
    week's Business Week.  6 full pages, 3 pages of monkeys (or chimps,
    whatever), 1 lead-in page, and a couple of text pages.
    
    Mark
    

    Today's Wall Street Journal features two full pages of Monkey Business
    ads.  First full page (B3) has no branding.  It states:
    
    	Choosing
    	the best
    	hardware 
    	to run
    	Windows NT 4.0
    	has forced
    	IS managers
    	to confront
    	their biggest
    	fears:
    
    Page B5 shows a monkey hiding its face with the words:
    
    	Failure.
    	Finances.
    	Future.
    
    The text continues:  Dealing with the monkeys on your back ...
    
    and then extols Digital's approach.  One new slogan appears:
    
    	Enterprise 
    	Computing.
    	It doesn't have
    	to be complicated.