On 2/1/2022 1:51 PM, Gérard Calliet wrote:
> Le 01/02/2022 à 18:23, Stephen Hoffman a écrit :
>> On 2022-01-28 11:00:25 +0000, Gérard Calliet said:
>>
>>> Le 27/01/2022 à 22:20, John Dallman a écrit :
>>>> If you could express yourselves much more concisely, you might get better
>>>> results.
>>> You are absolutely right. This has always been my problem.
>>
>> Prolix is, and it detracts.
> I must say, it is difficult of understand because it is not enought prolix. You
> have facts, interpretations, reasons, motives.
>
> Difficult to expose all. But necessary if you expect the ones you are
> criticizing have their reasons, and you try to understand and not to condamn.
> The french customers I know just condam. I was hoping thinking could do better.

All you can do is lay out your business plan for them. Either they will buy it,
or they will not do so.

> It is always a pain trying to think and expose it if the reader takes only the
> facts, and is always totally confindent on his interpretations, reasons, motives.
>
> Perhaps I have cultural difficulties regarding brainstorming, and the pure sense
> of thinktank is simpler than that I expect.
>>
>> The following two points seem the crux:
>>
>>> 3) x86 is necessary, but making it the top priority has been a mistake
>>
>> There are always trade-offs.
> oh yeah?

VSI has a business plan. They acquired what they needed to pursue that plan.
They are moving forward with their plan. They alsoo are listening to customers,
when they can do so. They did not plan on a new Alpha release. They listened
to customers and made a new Alpha release. They are supporting Alpha users.
I'm wondering whether Alpha users are supporting VSI?

>> Folks still on HPE versions aren't buying, or aren't buying yet.
>>
>> They aren't buying support, and aren't buying upgrades and that for whatever
>> local reasons, and are interested in per-call and fix-my-app fixes at most.
>>
>> Not buying means no revenues.
>>
>> More than a few sites do need dedicated staff for updates and overhauls and
>> app refactoring for their existing production, but that maintenance and upkeep
>> costs money and time and focus.
>>
>> VSI seemingly has no rights to patch older HPE versions.
> They say. And if it is the case, no idea from VSI to renegociate it.

As mentioned, VSI has what they need for their business plan. Doing mode would
dilute what they are trying to accomplish. Not a good idea.

> What about taking the fees for the transfered HPE support, and not thinking
> about being a little more cooperative?

At this time, I don't think VSI is providing support for HPe versions. If so,
it's most likely through HPe. Not the best business practice.

>> Which for those sites means providing workarounds for app problems on those
>> other and older versions at best, maybe some add-on back-porting
>> performance-permitting, and making suggestions for upgrades.
>>
>> Which is what you (Gérard) and others are already doing.
> We'll do lesser and lesser if everyones thinks VMS is dead. Ok, they are wrong,
> or perhaps not anyone can say if VMS will survive.

VSI is currently surviving. Whether VMS users are supporting that survival may
be in question for some users.

> What I try to say is that VSI creates by his way of acting the certitude that
> VMS will dye.
> It is a false belief, an effect of an unundurstandable strategy.
> There is another false belief that says "they have their reasons, poor guys,
> they do just what they can, and we have to accept everything".
> I try to explain why these two beliefs are false, and why they exist. A little
> bit complex.
>
> But we can go on just on the facts. Pry. And lament if we dye.
>>
>> VSI seemingly already lacks a staff large enough for the existing x86-64 port;
>> for what work they already have on their roadmap.
>>
>> Diluting VSI focus (further) to provide development outsourcing and app
>> services for older versions—and whatever else you're suggesting in that wall
>> of text you've posted—risks delaying the x86-64 portI'm not sure they would be
>> a lot of ressources to open the door at
> operations of collaboration with customers or consultants keeping alive the old
> things.
>
> What you say I do could be a little bit helped (for example helping someone who
> had port python, not being his concurrent), with some fees to VSI to deliver
> expertise. The old guys would be gratefull and would think about going ahead. On
> the contrary not any help and just force the pace to the old guys. They condamn.
>>
>> Which will detract from the revenues VSI sees available from those sites
>> wanting or needing to keep current hardware and software.
>>
>>> 4) VSI is creating a desert around it: no marketing, no community
>>> encouragement, discouragement of intermediaries; the ecosystem is heading for
>>> implosion
>>
>> So what are your plans for the production environments and apps and sites
>> you're working with, should that implosion arise?
> Doing for the Alpha and Itanium environments what I do for the VAX environments.
> But VMS will be as died as museum OSes.

There most likely be no more VAX, Alpha, and itanic CPUs. There is nobody in
the semiconductor industry interested in making them. Samsung had a license and
the design. They decided to make more money on flat panel TVs.

One will never move forward if one's attention is focused on the past.

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 2022-02-01 18:51:59 +0000, Gérard Calliet said:

> ...text expurgated...

The OpenVMS VAX V5.5 version you've mentioned elsewhere is ~thirty
years old and ~three architectures back, so there's clearly been no
hurry to upgrade.

Y'all are seemingly unhappy that no one is willing to spend their money
to allow y'all to stay in your server happy place. But aside from walls
of unhappy text and of deferring the port to x86-64, I'm not even sure
what you would prefer to happen here.

What to do for your particular affiliated sites? Do your own app due
diligence, figure out where your apps should be in five or ten years,
and figure out what's involved upgrading out of this or with porting
out of this, or what's involved with paying an entity to dig y'all out,
and present that to your management. Both plans with and without
dependencies on VSI. Present that to your management. As one of the
potential options... You could write a proposal with a sufficiently
large payment dangled, and see if VSI is interested. (I'd suggest
having somebody else edit the proposal, though.)

Your desire for (support of?) (blessing for?) (back-porting to?) (not
sure) OpenVMS VAX V5.5 aside, I'd suspect that any substantial delays
around the arrival of a viable x86-64 port will doom VSI. If your
affiliates do decide to stay on OpenVMS and do decide to upgrade,
you're going to be a whole lot more interested in x86-64 hardware, too.

--
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC

Le 01/02/2022 à 20:03, Simon Clubley a écrit :
> On 2022-02-01, Gérard Calliet <gerard.calliet@pia-sofer.fr> wrote:
>> Le 01/02/2022 à 18:23, Stephen Hoffman a écrit :
>>>
>>> VSI has what they think is a path to sustained revenue with their
>>> available staff and budget, and bespoke and app-specific services for
>>> long-retired OpenVMS and VAX/VMS production environments doesn't seem to
>>> be a big part of that. (yet?)
>> What do you think about a guy who will not sell to his customer what he
>> needs today to prepare him to buy a product which does'nt yet exist.
>> "You will not get the bread, I prepare for you the dessert!" Not my baker.
>> But perhaps, as you say, your baker has his reasons, we have just to
>> file at the baker's door, like they did in the old good times in russia
>> (russian are good believers).
>
> It's this kind of pompous waffly stuff that stops people from reading
> what you say Gerard.
You are right. I'm a little bit too melodramatic.

My position is somehow difficult: I'm between people who say everything
is fine, don't critic, and people who say everything is wrong, don't
bother critic.
>
> You have important things to say based on your experience. Say those
> things in a direct and to the point manner if you want people to read them.
1) You understood the major point: the commercial politic of VSI cannot
be accepted by the customers.

2) The second major point is VSI wants to "take all" in the market, and
number of intermediaries give up from VSI VMS for this reason (I have
examples in France and in Europ, I cannot give the names).

3) VSI is totally deaf in discussion with users clubs.

4) And Dave is right. You have a problem, negociate!

I know (same thing, I cannot give the names) that the biggest companies
can obtain what they want, using very long negociations.

There are negociations in the one to one mode (with the great
companies), not any negotiation on a general mode.
This choice makes the market totally unfair, generally untrustable and
close the market for the small and medium companies.

5) Very difficult to understand the real structure of the company
(europ, usa? teracloud, VSI?) and the choices in the key managers. Not
any transparency on the real results an investment ratios.

The following of the my story is: what can we expect? why are we in this
situation?

a1) A lot of people expect VSI is going to fail. My opinion is that VSI
can succeed if they dramatically change they strategy and relation with
their customers basis. And I fear they'll not change anything.

a2) If it is a failure, VMS will enter the category of legacy systems,
and we'll do "maintenance in operational condition" (I don't know the
exact english term, in french "maintenance en condition opérationnelle,
MCO"). What I'm now already doing for freezed sites on VAX/VMS.

b1) I think the reason of a bad choice of strategy (my opinion) is to
confuse relaunch and legacy, and not to really take the opportunity of
large new needs on sustainable development, green IT, reusibility...
Error a little bit surprising because the investor himself does green
development.

b2) My "batman concept". If you do a relaunch after decades of a
product, you have to exploit particularly the echoes that that times did
produce from the users. Like the bat you are able to orient yourself
thanks to the echoes. The major priorities would have been to do strong
surveys, promote relation with users club, build real collaborations
whith intermediary existant companies.

b3) I did'nt understand why not any marketing have been done. In 2014
the relaunch could have been said as "a major event in IT business".

The shorter I could :) (for me, in telegraphic-style :) )
>
> Simon. (In Yorkshire-style feedback mode. :-))
>

--
L'absence de virus dans ce courrier électronique a été vérifiée par le logiciel antivirus Avast.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

Le 02/02/2022 à 14:06, John Dallman a écrit :
> In article <j5v64gFdt84U1@mid.individual.net>,
> gerard.calliet@pia-sofer.fr (Gérard Calliet) wrote:
>
>> You are right. I'm a little bit too melodramatic.
>
> No, you're just too verbose and unclear.
>
>> My position is somehow difficult: I'm between people who say
>> everything is fine, don't critic
>
> I'm not saying everything is fine. But you do not make clear and specific
> points.
>
>> 1) You understood the major point: the commercial politic of VSI
>> cannot be accepted by the customers.
>
> Here, you are unclear. Do you mean "policy" or "politics"? It makes a
> significant difference to the statement.
You are just kidding? Thousands of line about, pricing, subscriptionq.
Request of being brief. And know "could you explain the choice of this
word". Seriously?
>
>> 2) The second major point is VSI wants to "take all" in the market,
>> and number of intermediaries give up from VSI VMS for this reason
>> (I have examples in France and in Europ, I cannot give the names).
>
> Are you sure that there is enough budget from VMS user organisations to
> sustain both the intermediaries and VSI? I suspect the intermediaries see
> potential competition, and nothing makes a consultant moan like
> competition.
You are not clear :) What do you mean by "VMS user organisations"
(clubs, customers, consultants?). You are saying a customer cannot pay
for consultancy And VSI, perhaps. And the selfish consultant do moan
about competition.

You are quite right, you get the point, it is about competition. Inegal
competition of course.

But we, the consultants, are fair-play. For the future of VMS we'll retire.

The point is: is it possible for the ecosystem VMS to have just a
monopoly in front of individual customers?

Is this model possible in a long term for VMS? Is VSI able to work like
IBM or Microsoft? Or the survival of the entire ecosystem depends on its
capacy to develop as a net business?

Do you think VMS customers will think quietly they are alone in front of
a just one actor? Are they so stupid to accept this dependency?
>
>> 3) VSI is totally deaf in discussion with users clubs.
>
> An English nuance: "clubs" sounds like hobbyist groups. VSI are mainly
> interested in businesses with money to spend. If you're talking to them
> on behalf of a user group, you need to tell them about its members and
> their budgets and substantiate your information.
Oh, yes. VSI is invited at all the events of the group I'm part of.

About all of the attendees are not hobbyists and VSI knows about it.
>
> A personal opinion: French philosophers, especially the postmodernist
> ones, have done the intellectual reputation of France a great deal of
> damage in the last few decades. Among English-speakers who do physical
> sciences and engineering, a Frenchman who writes at great length and in a
> confusing style is thereby assumed to be disconnected from reality and
> fundamentally unimportant. You've been sabotaging yourself.
>
> Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair, and consider that when
> you're dealing with English-speaking engineers, you're dealing with
> people who find it highly amusing, and demonstrative of the emptiness and
> meaninglessness of French-derived intellectualism.
"In this bright little package, now isn't it odd? You've a dime's
worth of something known only to God" (ask Stephen for the reference)
>
>> There are negociations in the one to one mode (with the great
>> companies), not any negotiation on a general mode.
>> This choice makes the market totally unfair, generally untrustable
>> and close the market for the small and medium companies.
>
> Two strategies are obvious here:
>
> 1) Demonstrate the size and combined budget of your user group and
> negotiate as a group.
Please help us, John. They don't negociate at all with (french?) groups.
>
> 2) Have one company go first, and share its results with other companies,
> making it easier for them to get similar deals.
Me too I like "The wizard of oz". In which place someone who has hard
negociated a privilege, and got it thanks its strength, will help others
getting it? (english "naïveté"?)
>
> However, no negotiating strategy will do any good unless you can clearly
> communicate what you want. You still haven't managed that.
Have a look at the work done by the association VMSgenerations about the
licencing. Real work.
>
>> 5) Very difficult to understand the real structure of the company
>> (europ, usa? teracloud, VSI?) and the choices in the key managers.
>> Not any transparency on the real results an investment ratios.
>
> Presumably you want to know these things to judge VSI's commitment to
> OpenVMS? If you explain it that way, you may get better answers.
Again, help me John, translate my questions. Perhaps VSI does not answer
anyone but clear english speakers. Just kidding.

The fact is VSI does'nt communicate clearly about its strategy, its
results, the changes in strategy when there are.

Just an example: the delivery of x86 production did changed a number of
time. It is very understandable huge project can encounters big
problems. We are adult and we can unserstand things. It would had be
better VSI had took the pain of explaining their problems, why their
expectations werea little bit wrong, how they think the better to do for
the customer who has to wait longer. Did you hear anything?
>
> Your choices are quite limited: VSI, or abandoning OpenVMS.
You don't say everything is fine, you say "accept or quit". Subtal
difference, but same result "don't bother critic".
HPE aren't
> going to return to supporting VMS; they would have abandoned it already
> if VSI had not been set up.
>
>> a1) A lot of people expect VSI is going to fail. My opinion is that
>> VSI can succeed if they dramatically change they strategy and
>> relation with their customers basis. And I fear they'll not change
>> anything.
>
> It depends what you mean by "fail." How about this for a definition of
> success?
Success: a lot of adoption of x86 port. Failure: a minority of adoption
of x86 port.
VSI can survice the relative failure of x86 port renforcing its
integration services and helping the others to go out VMS.
Or perhaps VSI has calculated that a minority of special customers
adopting x86 port is a sufficient degree of return to investment (who
knows?).
In the two cited cases, the majority of the customers we know will be in
big troubles.
So I do prefer the x86 port will be a success. And I think today, with
what I see, it seems imossible.
>
> At the start of 2027, VSI revenue from OpenVMS is larger than it is
> today at the start of 2022 and has grown during 2025 and 2026.
>
>> a2) If it is a failure, VMS will enter the category of legacy
>> systems, and we'll do "maintenance in operational condition" (I
>> don't know the exact english term, in french "maintenance en
>> condition opérationnelle, MCO"). What I'm now already doing for
>> freezed sites on VAX/VMS.
>
> I am not quite sure what you mean, but there are no standardised English
> terms for this. Individual companies may have private standards, but they
> are unlikely to be more widely understood. How about explaining what you
> mean?
It is about freezed application which have to live a long time. For
example appications strongly certified (because of big danger, or
garanties about human lives,...). The application, hardware, maintenance
operations have to be the same for decades. There are companies who
garantie that. It's named in france "Maintenance en Condition
Opérationnelle".
>
>> b1) I think the reason of a bad choice of strategy (my opinion) is
>> to confuse relaunch and legacy, and not to really take the
>> opportunity of large new needs on sustainable development, green
>> IT, reusibility...
>
> What do those things /mean/ at an engineering level? You keep coming back
> to them, but you don't indicate what actions would be required. They
> sound like assurances for the public relations department, not a program
> for engineering.
>
> Guessing wildly, does "sustainable development" mean "We can carry on
> using our existing hardware and it won't break down?" If so, that's not
> possible: the hardware was not designed or built for an indefinite life.
>
> Does "Green IT" mean "Using less energy?" If so, that's a good thing, but
> x86 will use less energy than old Alpha or Itanium systems. Using ARM
> would use even less, but when VSI started on the port, ARM server
> hardware was close to non-existent. Switching to ARM now would be foolish
> because it would create even more delays. Starting on ARM once x86 is
> complete could make sense.
You just said it: "What do those things /mean/ at an engineering
level?". I'm not at all in paragraph b1 speaking at an engineering
level. I speak at the level the investor had to choice to invest in VMS,
and at the level of choices of strategy the board and ceo has to make
the investment successfull.

On 2/2/2022 11:53 AM, Gérard Calliet wrote:

> It is about freezed application which have to live a long time. For example
> appications strongly certified (because of big danger, or garanties about human
> lives,...). The application, hardware, maintenance operations have to be the
> same for decades. There are companies who garantie that. It's named in france
> "Maintenance en Condition Opérationnelle".

Let me attempt to address this point.

There are no guarantees. I learned this a long time ago. An entity can make
some "guarantee", but that guarantee is good only as long as that entity chooses
to make good on it, or that entity ceases to exist.

DEC no longer exists. Any guarantees DEC made to anyone are now worthless.

VSI is not DEC. VSI has no commitment to make good on DEC guarantees.

VSI is a rather small company. They are limited in what they can do. They
cannot build new VAX systems. They cannot build new Alpha systems. Nobody I
know would want to build new itanic systems.

As far as this topic is concerned, there are no guarantees that mean a damn
thing, and that includes x86 systems. They will not last forever. They are
available now, but will they be available in 10 years? 20 years? Perhaps not.
And so you should see that there are no alternatives for your desires for
systems to last forever. Salesmen might make promises. The promises will
sooner or later not be kept.

As for certified applications, systems, and such. While people want to count on
an initial investment, the universe doesn't care,not one bit. Reality is that
ongoing efforts will be required to maintain high standards.

An an example, data backups. Just because a particular backup is restored
correctly in no way guarantees the next backup will do so. It must also be
tested to see if it will restore correctly.

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486

On 2/2/2022 3:27 PM, Dave Froble wrote:
> On 2/2/2022 11:53 AM, Gérard Calliet wrote:
>> It is about freezed application which have to live a long time. For
>> example
>> appications strongly certified (because of big danger, or garanties
>> about human
>> lives,...). The application, hardware, maintenance operations have to
>> be the
>> same for decades. There are companies who garantie that. It's named in
>> france
>> "Maintenance en Condition Opérationnelle".
>
> Let me attempt to address this point.
>
> There are no guarantees.  I learned this a long time ago.  An entity can
> make some "guarantee", but that guarantee is good only as long as that
> entity chooses to make good on it, or that entity ceases to exist.
>
> DEC no longer exists.  Any guarantees DEC made to anyone are now worthless.
>
> VSI is not DEC.  VSI has no commitment to make good on DEC guarantees.
>
> VSI is a rather small company.  They are limited in what they can do.
> They cannot build new VAX systems.  They cannot build new Alpha
> systems.  Nobody I know would want to build new itanic systems.

Not even a big company could make money on those.

> As far as this topic is concerned, there are no guarantees that mean a
> damn thing, and that includes x86 systems.  They will not last forever.
> They are available now, but will they be available in 10 years?  20
> years?  Perhaps not. And so you should see that there are no
> alternatives for your desires for systems to last forever.  Salesmen
> might make promises.  The promises will sooner or later not be kept.

Given the market position x86-64 has today then it is going to take
a very long time before x86-64 could be totally gone.

It would take like 5-10 years before a new ISA became "the ISA".

Then it would take like 10 years before production of x86-64 would stop.

And the it would take like 10 more years before the hardware was
too old and unreliable for production usage.

That is probably as good as it gets in this business.

Arne

Just a side note on this thread that should give a lot of people a
good laugh.

I am having no problem understanding what Gérard is saying. Must
be that although I was born a native English speaker I spent enough
time in Europe listening to and speaking these other languages that
my mind doesn't see the flowery prose that is natural to French
speakers. :-)

I was once praised in college over a philosophical paper I wrote
for my German Course. The Professor's wife, who was German, read
it and said it was written in the traditional German Philosophical
Style. :-) Not bad for someone who was told in High School after
two years of Latin that they had no aptitude for languages and
should not bother trying to learn any.

bill

Le 02/02/2022 à 22:44, John Dallman a écrit :
> In article <j5vr7pF1m43U1@mid.individual.net>,
> gerard.calliet@pia-sofer.fr (Gérard Calliet) wrote:
>
>>> Here, you are unclear. Do you mean "policy" or "politics"? It
>>> makes a significant difference to the statement.
>> You are just kidding? Thousands of line about, pricing,
>> subscriptionq. Request of being brief. And know "could you explain
>> the choice of this word". Seriously?
>
> "Politic" is not a common English word. If you meant "policy", then
> that's quite clear, but the word you used is not an easy mis-spelling of
> that.
>
> If you meant "politics", which is a much more plausible error, then you
> seem to be alleging the VSI has motives other than commercial ones.
>
> So what were you saying?
I meant policy, and policy about pricing, subscription.
>
>>> Are you sure that there is enough budget from VMS user organisations
>>> sustain both the intermediaries and VSI? I suspect the
>>> intermediaries see potential competition, and nothing makes
>>> a consultant moan like competition.
>> You are not clear :) What do you mean by "VMS user organisations"
>> (clubs, customers, consultants?). You are saying a customer cannot
>> pay for consultancy And VSI, perhaps. And the selfish consultant do
>> moan about competition.
>
> No, that wasn't clear. I meant to ask: given the various people and
> organisations in France who have budgets for OpenVMS, do they have enough
> total budget to sustain both the consultants and a slice of VSI?
>
>> You are quite right, you get the point, it is about competition.
>> Inegal competition of course.
>
> "Inegal"? Is this a typo for "unequal," or something else?
Unequal, unfair, distorted competition, monopoly situation. All that in
the domain of integration and services.
VSI takes over a domain which was not that of the OS supplier. Its
situation makes this taking over an unbalanced one (monopoly).
Besides that, the commercial policy, which is on the type "one to one"
favors the very few close acquaintances of vsi.
It is not a healthy situation. I think an ecosystem can survive if it is
worth it to use and contribute to commercialize it not only for the one
supplier. On the contrary if you are not a huge company, you get an
implosion.
>
>> The point is: is it possible for the ecosystem VMS to have just a
>> monopoly in front of individual customers?
>>
>> Is this model possible in a long term for VMS? Is VSI able to work
>> like IBM or Microsoft? Or the survival of the entire ecosyste
>> depends on its capacy to develop as a net business?
>
> As far as I know, the long-term survival of the ecosystem does depend on
> VSI. Without them, there will be no more updates. That doesn't mean VSI
> has to take all the budgets, but it likely will need to get some of the
> budget that's currently going to consultants.
Perhaps what you say is the effective calcul of VSI.

The effect is transforming a fragile niche market in a desert.
>
>> Please help us, John. They don't negociate at all with (french?)
>> groups.
>
> I have no stake in this game. I work for an ISV that gave up supporting
> OpenVMS at about v7. I joined this newsgroup because I'm interested in
> operating systems, and there was a possibility that long-term customers
> might want OpenVMS again. There have, however, been no requests so far.
I understood that. I was just saying they don't negociate with groups,
and your advice cannot work, if you tried it you'll experience it.
>
>> I speak at the level the investor had to choice to invest in
>> VMS, and at the level of choices of strategy the board and ceo has
>> to make the investment successfull.
>
> You may be assuming too much about the investor's motives and plans. Such
> things are not always planned in great detail.
I'm speaking just on the opposite direction. Not in the details, but in
the general intuition from what someone expect he can invest, the axis
he thinks is good to succeed.

I suppose there exist domains in industry, IT, where the old idea of
investment continues to exist. An idea, an analysis of its adoption by
customers, and so an investment. In this logic, the investor has some
big picture in the brain. I'm speaking of that.

I know the investment now is hugely another sort of method. Statitics,
excel analysis, huge amount of financement, playing exclusively with
what is "in the trend".

Perhaps the old classic way of investment still exists, and I think that
investment on VMS had been on that style. However it cannot be on the
side of the billion investments. If it were VSI would not have ressource
problems. It is a smart and small investment.

My point is VSI has to continue being smart, and exploit what is at the
root of the intuition the investor had. It is not at all trivial.
>
>> The source I see is the fact VMS, which is somehow sustainable,
>> encounters an era where sustainability is hugely in demand. Exploit
>> that!
>
> Here I'm not sure I understand you. I /think/ you're saying that if VMS
> were to become less demanding in the hardware and energy it requires,
> that this could make it far more popular? Well, maybe, but getting from
> here to there is going to be a lot of work, and it isn't obvious that VMS
> is the best operating system for the job. Google and Amazon are doing
> quite a lot of that with ARM-based Linux in their clouds.
No, it is a lot more general than that. It is about long term cycles of
application development. Cyclic investment. Reusability. Sobriety. Local
mastery.
>
>> You get it? So you understand now why the investor bet about VMS
>> was hugely good, and you know now why the relaunch is, yes, a very
>> discrete event, but just the one which does the little genius
>> difference.
>
> Afraid not, no.
I see that. It is a problem of sense of an investment. Very difficult to
understand. As I said elsewhere, it was somehow a madness to invest on
VMS. ALl the excel indicators were saying it was follish to think about
a future for VMS. But the investor took the bet, and they did it.

>> No doing survey and hearing customers and accepting collaborations
>> is not a huge amount of cost. Not doing that is lossing a huge
>> amount of resources accumulated in 4 decades.
>
> You need to substantiate that. How many sites running VMS? How many
> machines? What proportion of them in business-critical roles? What
> applications and services have been created by end-users? What has been
> created by consultants?
How can I answer that without serious survey and market inquiry? You
give me argument to claim for that.
>
>> And no, no and no, reread your manual of logic. The necessary is
>> not the sufficient. x86 is necessary, it is not sufficient. And a
>> priority is not an exclusivity.
>
> You seem to be saying that in France, customers want to see large-scale
> plans years in advance, and won't mind if they suffer multi-year delays?
>
> In the US, people with grand plans they'll deliver in five years time
> don't get listened to. Anybody can come up with plans that sound good. So
> nobody takes any notice of them: you need something deliverable before
> you can get commitments.
Do you see you are in contradiction with yourself? If anybody cannot
take notice of long term promises, what about 2014 x86 promise in 2021?
And of course during this time another priority is building trust with
of-the-day deliverable.

And you don't see on the other side that a large part of the market for
VMS has totally different agenda. 5 years is a little bit short period
for them. THe chance for VMS is to cope with this sort of agenda. And,
again, if you think in the big style, you get the intuition that the new
trend of sustainability is going to create market for the one who need
to get long time agenda.

- just for fun -
A song of the old time "the time there are a changin". what happens to
the investment when the time scales start to change? How, there, to
apply the Lorents transformation?

>
> John

--
L'absence de virus dans ce courrier électronique a été vérifiée par le logiciel antivirus Avast.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus

Le 27/01/2022 à 16:48, Gérard Calliet a écrit :

A major cultural difference between french people and american people is
the order of exposition: american people begin with the positive, and at
the end explain how to overcome the negatice; french people explain
first the negative to overcome, and conclude with the positive.
The more you like something, the more you'll be begining with the
critics to evacuate any naïveté about the positive you admire.

I admit I have been a little too severe perhaps. However it denotes how
founded I'm on the succees of VMS with VSI and all of us.

So, for the non-french readers, my introduction:
""Once again, /to conclude/ to *introduce*, it is in any case a long and
fruitful time with VMS that lies ahead. Whether it's a relaunch or a
classic "legacy" operation, VMS will remain an invaluable tool for its
users for a long time to come.""

> I hope that the year 2022 will be a decisive step in the recovery of VMS.
>
> I would like to clarify a few points about my personal involvement in
> France and the French situation.
>
> I am proud to have contributed to the transformation of the DECUS heir
> users club (hp-interex France) into the VMSgenerations association
> focused on VMS. It is a contribution to a collaborative work that goes
> far beyond my own contribution, and I am filled with gratitude and honor
> towards all the members that this club allows me to meet.
>
> This club is a success because it responds to a need and relies on
> resources that have only been allowed to emerge.  All of us in this club
> share the idea that other clubs of this type should emerge everywhere,
> specialized in VMS and contemporary to its recovery.
>
> Since the creation of the club, I have made a point of restricting my
> personal communications, and I would like to make it clear that
> everything that has been published so far under the name of
> VMSgenerations has always been the result of collaborative work in the
> association.
>
> The current situation in France and the behavior of VSI lead me to
> seriously doubt my work. VSI rigorously ignores the work of our
> association - except for courteous answers without real content. The
> vast majority of French customers are very uncomfortable with VSI's
> commercial policy, I don't know any customer who is seriously
> considering a port to x86 and the general opinion of customers and
> consultants is that VMS will disappear in the short or medium term.
>
> Having worked on the durability of VMS can therefore appear as very bad
> advice, and, for those who have committed themselves to it, at the very
> least as an investment with no return on investment.
>
> Unless there is a drastic reorientation of VSI's strategy, I am
> convinced, like many others, that it will fail in the short or medium
> term. It becomes ethically very difficult for an independent consultant
> to advise to stay under VMS.
>
> I would like to be wrong. But it is the same analysis that made me
> anticipate the recovery of 2014, the contribution to the transformation
> of DECUS France into VMS generations, both validated by experience, and
> the prediction of a failure for VSI when I became aware of its strategy.
> My professional relations can testify to my anticipation of the current
> crisis as early as 2014.
>
> The idea of a VMS takeover was great. Its implementation was completely
> disappointing.
>
> The investors' intuition was right: the intrinsic value of VMS had the
> potential to become productive again in the new context of 2014. But
> that intuition was not pursued, and VMS's value and contextual
> consideration were forgotten.
>
> What is the new context? The appearance of sustainability in the
> economic landscape is the beginning of a development that can only get
> bigger and bigger. For the IT world, this appearance radically
> transforms the consideration of what has been called "legacy systems"
> until now.
>
> VMS was not conceived at a time when the concept of sustainability
> existed. But its founding concepts of systemicity, backward
> compatibility, local control and reasoned scalability meet the new
> concepts of locality, sobriety and reusability.
>
> The VMS revival is therefore an ideal laboratory for experimenting with
> the new deal as regards (misnamed) legacy systems. Nothing trivial here,
> because everything has to be reinvented in both purely technical and
> economic terms.
>
> It is worth noting in passing that the main investor had already
> invested in legacy systems and is interested in green development. His
> intuition did not come from nowhere.
>
> But the implementation fell into all the (predictable) mistakes of a
> relaunch that does not respect the specifics of what to relaunch and
> when and where it is relaunched. VMS was relaunched as one would have
> done for a sub-brand of Apple: a flagship product (x86), maximization of
> immediate profits (the "clearing house" concept exposed by Terry
> Holmes), no attention to the temporalities of the existing base,
> unshakeable confidence in the brand (no marketing, no criticism of past
> business practices).
>
> Whereas a relaunch requires intelligent recovery from the previous long
> time, transmission of positive achievements and criticism of previous
> mistakes, and adaptation to what allows recovery in the new context. And
> what VSI has systematically left out is the crucial question of the
> transfer of skills and has completely ignored the essential need for
> stability of the majority of clients, which explains their loyalty to VMS.
>
> The disastrous results are there.
>
> The centralization of profits discourages intermediaries, at least in
> France, who were the best advocates of VMS. Only the big international
> consulting companies resist, for which VSI has favors that border on
> abusive competition. The exclusive supplier discourages non-VSI open
> source development companies.
>
> The focus on a single target (x86) that would be the sign of renewal
> diverts attention from the long-cycle needs of the customer base. It
> dries up the general investment, drains the cash flow and is one of the
> causes of the product price increase. We find ourselves in the
> extraordinary circumstance of customers paying for a solution that is
> only on the horizon, a solution that they will probably not adopt,
> because the current conditions of use of the product will discourage the
> general management from using VMS.
>
> But the most serious thing, which was structurally foreseeable, is the
> impoverishment of the Boston center, a founding engineering in the
> imbalance with the new effective center of decision and profit in
> Europe. The Boston offices have disappeared, the data center has been
> outsourced, and most of the key managers are non-VMSians. The Boston
> center is a victim of the same trend that took place before 2013: very
> high quality poses immediate profitability problems, and the trend is to
> go offshore to reduce costs. It is easier to invest in integration,
> service, which will be reconvertible in case of failure into external
> porting services (alliance with Sector7).
>
> There is the problem that Digital had encountered: complex balancing
> between decision centers in the world. What we are seeing is a gradual
> underground takeover from the European center, closer to the investor,
> both by reducing resources and by appointing people close to the
> investor to take charge. Seen from Europe, the billing goes through the
> Teracloud entity for an officially American company, whose choice of
> managers seems to come from Europe. Thus the so-called "VSI" entity is
> really difficult to define, let alone its real strategies.
>
> But the root of all the problems is that of the deep meaning of a
> relaunch, which is lost from sight. If the essential importance of
> fundamental engineering is underestimated, we move from the register of
> transmission to that of inheritance. There is a difference between
> allowing transmission between generations and pilfering from
> grandparents' property, or violently succeeding them during their
> lifetime. This calls into question the very core of the possibility of
> VMS revival.
>
> VMS is not (for the moment) a legacy system. The possibility of its
> revival is part of the new economic trend of sustainable development in
> the IT world. The excellence of VMS is passed on FROM THE LIVING of VMS,
> which has nothing to do with a legacy. It is true that making this
> possible is much more complex than simply doing legacy management.
>
> For the moment VSI is only organizing itself within the classic
> framework of operating a legacy system, which allows it to wait serenely
> for the end of VMS. One of the consequences of this situation is the
> inevitable reproduction of a conflict between old and new - nothing less
> innovative than the conflict between old and new -. This explains the
> chaotic competition between the Boston pole and the Melmo pole.
>
> This analysis is anything but recent. This failure of a strong intuition
> because of the application of classic but inadequate solutions has been
> mine since 2014. In the current situation, I only have concrete
> confirmation of this.
>
> What are the concrete consequences for the VMS ecosystem? Either VSI
> will empower the ecosystem to gain confidence in a "revival of the
> revival," and a whole complex and very promising future is in store. It
> is not difficult to predict that all players other than VSI will respond
> with great enthusiasm to any proposal to collaborate with VSI, and the
> wealth of inventiveness and excellence is widely available throughout
> the VMS ecosystem. Or VSI can continue on its current path that will
> make VMS a classic legacy system.
>
> In both cases, the role of intermediaries and user clubs is
> professionally important: each customer will be able to make the best
> possible choices thanks to these expertise circuits: porting, freezing
> in the existing system, modernization under VMS...
>
> This confirms us all in our efforts... and in our expectations.
>
> It remains to give a few points that seem vital to me in the first
> instance for a better business climate with VSI:
>
> VSI must have the humility to organize a thorough market analysis, which
> has never been done
>
> VSI must listen to its customers, work in concert with user organizations
>
> VSI must be transparent about its organization (national and
> international), its financial flows, the cost/productivity/profit ratio
> of its various business units, its investment ratio per business unit
>
> I would like to remind of what I said in my introduction. Here I am
> speaking only in my own name, or rather according to the service
> objectives of my company. According to my analysis, this is a worrying
> period for VMS, and I have experienced the complete deafness of VSI,
> including in the presence of larger entities other than my company
> alone. Having contributed to engaging other entities or clients in my
> assessment of the future of VMS, it seems natural to me to develop as
> objectively as possible the position of my company.
>
> Once again, to conclude, it is in any case a long and fruitful time with
> VMS that lies ahead. Whether it's a relaunch or a classic "legacy"
> operation, VMS will remain an invaluable tool for its users for a long
> time to come.
>
> Perhaps the bet is only for the investor: will he be smarter than the
> trends and able to understand and develop his first intuition? In this
> case VMS will be an impressive innovative revival. Otherwise it will be
> an instructive experience for the emergent domain of sustainability in IT.
>