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.

An investor is not at all an engineer. He has a very large culture about
the business markets, the different stories here. And he makes a bet.
Same thing for the board: the choices on strategy are risked expectations.

It has something to do with the geniuses of the fashion week, who see
the actual trends, and choose the way to make the little difference
which will succeed. The difference between an investor and a fashion
manager being the huge amount of realities an investor or a ceo has to
digest.

To go on with the metaphor a bad fashion week manager just do what it is
in the actual trend. The good one tries to understand what is the source
of the actual trend and creates something a little bit different closer
to the initial source, and everyone buys.

The source I see is the fact VMS, which is somehow sustainable,
encounters an era where sustainability is hugely in demand. Exploit that!

I'll not explain here the huge trend about sustainability, green IT, and
so. Buy books, attend one of the thousands training about it (MIT has
good ones, some good universities in england also).

And think the "big picture" of that, the long term history that causes
that.

If you have got the big picture of that trend, go back to what you know
about VMS story, VMS capacities, compar VMS story to IBM story and to
Unix/Linux stories.

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.

You have got it? Explain that to the VSI's ceo, in good english.

>
>> 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.
>
> That's a huge amount of costly work. /VSI is not DEC/, they don't have
> the people to do that all around the world. They've been tackling the
> problem that certainly doomed OpenVMS if it was not solved: the absence
> of hardware to run it on.
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.
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.
>
>> 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".
>
> Because, given the OpenVMS market share, it /wasn't/ a major event in the
> IT industry. They knew they could not deliver anything big immediately.
> Making large claims without delivery just destroys your own credibility.
>
> John

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