AT&T Joining OSF

[Gary Allen]

In article <57 at minya.UUCP> jc at minya.UUCP (John Chambers) writes:
[......]
>Um, isn't this a bit naive?  The past 20 years of the computing field have
>pretty much proven that IBM can market nearly anything they want, regardless
>of its quality.  Their products have covered the full range from super-shoddy 
>to incredibly-good, and this has relatively little to do with sales.  OSF,
>with IBM's sales budget, could sell a buggy, user-unfriendly Unix to much
>of the market and convince people that it was good.  (Can you say DOS or
>OS/2?  I knew you could! :-)  The idea that the "market" will drive out
>bad products is a nice piece of AdamSmithian Pollyanism, but the facts
>in the computer field (where most purchase decisions are made by managers
>who are ignorant of current computers) are clearly otherwise.

To start with OSF is not IBM is not DEC is not Apollo is not HP, ad nauseum.
OSF does not have IBM's sales budget.

Yeah, I can spell MS-DOS and PC-DOS along with CP/M and a whole bunch of
other acronyms. While we all agree that technically superior products are not
always the ones that succeed, it is the right of the customer to decide what s/he
wants. They obviously have fish-to-fry other than technical merits. I'm not naive
enough to believe that "bad" products are driven out of the marketplace,
but wise enough to know that unwanted products are, which is not the same
thing. By the way, which of those products were "incredibly-good"? Can you spell
Peanuts and Chicklets (PC Jr)?

>Not that ATT & friends are likely to do much better.  I mean, look at the
>grand mess they made of shared memory, despite the fact that the Multics
>people had already shown them how to do it right.  :-(

Mach did much better!!

Gary Allen
Apollo Computer
Chelmsford, MA
{decvax,yale,umix}!apollo!gallen