[geeks] snatching defeat fro the jaws of victory

[Chris Byrne]

All this talk (and those gorgeous pics) of DEC systems has got me thinking
about some computing history.

I myself have a DEC PWS433-A/U and aside from the OS problems I've been
having I love it. I used to have an AlphaStation 500 which was great, and
I've worked on literally hundreds of DEC systems from PDP, to VAX, to Alpha,
to Intel, which aside from their pretty poor attempts at low end office PC's
were all excellent.

For years DEC had the best service people, and certainly the highest revenue
service contracts (the whole purpose Compaq bought them in the first place)
yet they managed to bleed money at a furious rate for over a decade thus
enabling what I consider to be the worst of the PC majors (for various
reasons I won't go into at the moment).

Some companies have this absolutely amazing ability to snatch defeat from
the jaws of victory.

DEC is of course a major example but I don't think they are the worse.

Certainly Apple computer has an impressive record in this regard. I don't
really have to go into all their missed opportunities and truly impressive
litany of total screwups, but the company that takes the cake has got to be
Xerox.

Think about it. Here's a partial list of the things that Xerox (mostly
through PARC) either flat out invented, productized, or at least brought to
usefulness but failed to capitalize on.

Ethernet
Office networking
Pervasive Desktop Workstations
Word Processing
Desktop Publishing
WYSIWIG
Windowed interfaces
Interactive multitasking
Worksharing/groupware
Rapid Application Development (RAD)
Integrated Development Environments (IDE)

And all because the execs at the top either didn't understand the potential
or the technologies, or they did and thought that they wouldn't make them
any money (or worse thought they would be a threat to their existing profit
centers).

And please let's not split hairs about Doug englebart, bob metcalfe,
Smalltalk, lisp, etc.. etc.. we could be flaming each other for months on
these things. I'm just using those things listed above to demonstrate my
point.


Oh and for just a little irony, I was watching mystery men as I wrote this.

Chris Byrne