marketing vs. merit

[Henry Spencer]

> # If you consider marketing success a sign of technical merit, I trust you are
> # using an ASR33 connected to a VAX 730 running VMS on RL01 disks to write
> # assembler code for an IBM PC running MSDOS? ;-)
> 
> Your feeble attempt at a humorous counterexample is, well, unlaughable.
> The worst/slowest of the items you mention (the ASR33 and the VAX 730) have
> next to no share of the market today...

Ah, but they were highly profitable in their time.  As one of the original
DEC Unix folks said of the VT-100, "it's hard to convince somebody that his
product is garbage when he's sold 100,000 of them".

> VMS and big VAXEN are successes NOW in TECHNICAL MARKETS...

If you think this says anything about the merits of gotos in DCL, please tell
me whether you think Reagan's election victory in 1984 constituted popular
endorsement of his policies on, say, abortion.  Or whether the sales of the
IBM PC are due to the beauty and elegance of its memory-addressing model.
Or whether OS/360 was the reason people bought IBM 360s.

Marketing success and technical merit are largely unrelated.  Oh, technical
merit *helps* to sell things, but it's by no means a requirement.  IBM has
built a multinational empire on aggressive marketing and excellent support
of usually-inferior equipment.
-- 
"Noalias must go.  This is           |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
non-negotiable."  --DMR              | {ihnp4,decvax,uunet!mnetor}!utzoo!henry