[rescue] Appropriate OS for Alpha?

[Chris Petersen]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2002 at 12:08:00PM -0500, Eric Dittman wrote:
> > And hey, at least HP-UX has some ISVs...I think Compaq just totally missed
> > the boat on what it takes to support an operating system platform.  You've
> > gotta get out and beat the bushes (unless you're microsoft) to keep people
> > interested.  I think the traditional box-building mindset of Compaq set in -
> > "We'll just build these Alphas and people will come running to use them..."
> > I know for a fact that part of the reason my company dropped Alpha support
> > back in '98-99 was lack of ISV support from Compaq...Rumour has it that that
> > played heavily into Microsoft's dropping of WinNT Alpha...
> 
> Actually, Compaq dropped support for WNT Alpha first, so Microsoft
> dropped the product as an externally-available product.  They still
> continued to work on the OS internally until fairly recently as that
> was their only stable 64-bit test bed for Win64.  I'm pretty sure
> they are using Itanium systems now, although I wouldn't be surprised
> if they were still using Alphas for development as well.

Well, technically what happened was this:

- Compaq axed the DECWest programming team that essentially were resources
provided to Microsoft for WinNT Alpha development.  Auspiciously, the idea
was that Compaq expected Microsoft to fund and develop Win2k and future
releases on their own from that point forward.

- Microsoft in turn dropped Win2k Alpha and any future development.

Essentially, the ISV world expects a lot from the non-Microsoft platform
vendors.  Things like free hardware, free programmatic resources/support,
etc.  

Internal rumour has it that when Compaq pulled the same thing with us, we
responded with dropping Alpha support for Unigraphics (our CAD system). 
Prior to this change, DEC had provided us with tons of hardware, support,
etc.

It's not hard to imagine how all these freebies would be reacted to by a
company used to building boxes for people to buy.  Heck, even common sense
starts to question this situation, but I can say that it's definetely common
in the Unix workstation world, at least.  You combine that style of business
with the rush toward NT back in the late '90s, which strained many of the
development units of traditional workstation application vendors, and it's
not impossible to see why the disappearing Unix workstation situation
occured.  There's only so far development dollars stretch (granted,
intelligent programming will stretch that farther), and nobody wanted to
blow it and miss the NT market, but Microsoft definetely wasn't going to
step up to the plate in the old-fashioned style...

Chris

-- 
Chris Petersen			  E-mail: havoc at apk.net
Systems Engineer, ExperTeam Services, EDS PLM Solutions