Alas, poor DEC, I knew him well

[altivo]

Here's a significant image of corporate hubris.



DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) was an industry leader from the 1960s until it faded with a whimper in the mid-1990s. The company created several major lines of micro and minicomputers, including the PDP's, the VAX and MicroVAX, and the whole Alpha line. They also produced some remarkably efficient and powerful operating systems, most notably RSTS/E and OpenVMS. They failed to keep up with the shift toward desktop computing power, though, and in 1998 the remains of their assets were bought up by Compaq. The photo shows the graphical console login screen generated by the last (2000, version 7.3) distribution of OpenVMS for VAX hardware. Notice how Compaq promptly "rebranded" OpenVMS as their own, replacing the copyrights and blasting their logo across the screen in screaming red letters. It wasn't their work, except in a legal sense. The designs they were claiming were all done by Digital, some of them as much as 20 or more years earlier.

Compaq only lasted another four years, before being gobbled up in turn by Hewlett Packard. The current versions of OpenVMS (8.3 and 8.4) run on the DEC Alpha processors which are no longer manufactured, but still in use outside the US for the most part, and the HP Itanium, a 64 bit processor that was HP's answer to the Alpha. Those versions loudly proclaim Hewlett Packard as copyright holder, though much of the code remains identical to the original Digital model. HP hasn't been doing so well in the last couple of years, either.

Somehow, though, American corporations have become utterly wrapped up in the notion that appearance counts more than reality. Putting their name on something makes it "theirs" whether they originated or built the object or not. And the history of Compaq and HP shows the futility of this idea.

The screen image, by the way, was snapped off the monitor of a machine running Linux and acting as an X-terminal for a virtual (emulated) VAXServer 3900 (SIMH software) with OpenVMS 7.3 running. I've fiddled on and off with this setup for nearly four years trying to get that particular screen display to come up. There are several bugs in the 1999 DECWindows (DEC's version of X) that made it difficult to achieve, I think I've just about found the needed workarounds for all of them. Some were never officially documented in anything that remains available today. No, I won't be trying to fix them, but I'll probably write up a complete explanation of what I've learned, with the necessary steps to work around it.

Storm warnings and high winds keeping us up, even though the shearer is coming tomorrow. Thank goodness the front passing through should lower the temperatures to something more practical for sheep wrestling.

Comments

[baphnedia]

Well, given how the intellectual property industry works - where such things are bought and sold (or otherwise acquired), it's one thing for them to say that yes, we own the copyright.. in the legal sense. Where I sense the issue is that the creator (who is not necessarily the copyright holder) is given no quarter.

In this case, it could be as simple as "(c) #### by Hewlett-Packard, originally created by DEC."

[altivo]

You got it. I'm offended by the way in which they seem to claim credit for someone else's hard work. It's as if a wealthy art collector bought up paintings by Leonardo, Vermeer, and Picasso, then painted in his own signature over the artists' own.

But even more significant, I think, is the way in which these corporate goons seem to think that owning the copyright makes them as smart as the originators. They flush away the "expensive, overpaid" remnants of the original support staff, turn the product over to a bunch of cheap hirelings, and wonder why it begins to crumble. Compaq bought the Digital name and logos, and could easily have kept and used those to bolster their credit with the original customers, but no, they had to beat their chests like the apes they were. Of course they got what they deserved. DEC's loyal supporters deserved better than that.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

I disagree. Corporations aren't people, and the entire point of buying-up failing companies for their assets is to build the brand up for the parent company. There would be no point in keeping the branding for a defunct company since it would just serve to cause confusion at best, and the "about" credits in the software would still reflect the names of the original DEC people who did the creating.

For another example, all StorageTek branding seems to have disappeared when Sun acquired them, and then when Sun was gobbled-up by Oracle, all Sun branding vanished as well, leaving Oracle branding on Java, Open Office, MySQL, and VirtualBox. It doesn't matter how many things were made under those respective corporate brands, when those companies ceased to be strong enough to thrive or survive on their own and were bought-out, as entities they ceased to exist going forward.

[altivo]

I think Compaq would have done much better to trade on DEC's good name and customer goodwill with something like "Digital, a subsidiary of Compaq" than by putting their own, already sullied name onto products that had good recognition and acceptance. The results in the marketplace seem to bear that out.

Macy's did the same thing in Chicago by buying up the 150-year-old Marshall Field's department stores and rebranding them. They lost all the customers, and now they're looking to unload the mess they created.

Customer loyalty is a valuable asset too, and especially so to corporations that have already been losing face in the marketplace. Sticking a Compaq logo on the front of the Alpha computer line didn't help sales at all. It drove customers away from the line and into something else like rats leaving a sinking ship.

Oracle is doing the same thing, and with the same predictable results. I've abandoned plans to move from Microsoft SQL to MySQL, and I'm looking at LibreOffice as a replacement for the now tainted OpenOffice. I know I'm not alone in this.

This kind of change is only advantageous when the new brand has a better reputation and acceptance than the old one did. You cannot shore up an untrusted name by plastering it onto things that were once respected. You just drag them down into the mud.

[kakoukorakos.livejournal.com]

Now I do agree with you there. Maybe Compaq would've done a lot better had they tried to develop a "Compaq-DEC" server line, seeing as to how their reputation has always been that they make low-end junk. Kind of like how hp has mostly kept its name on its better equipment, while slapping the hp-Compaq name on its junkiest laptops. I see it as less of an ethical issue, more as a corporate stupidity and arrogance problem. I mean, it takes someone suffering from myopic hubris to think for a second that "Compaq" was a more respected and recognized brand than Digital.

Oracle also really screwed-up, they are known for one thing, their databases, and going on such an epic spending spree just makes it look like they're out-of-control, dabbling in companies they know nothing about, and that's caused a lot of folks to abandon Sun-branded equipment and search out alternatives for software, as you mention. I can't fault the notion that it's good to acquire certain sorts of companies, vertical integration can make companies very successful, if they don't have to depend on others for parts of the solutions they're selling and can make profits on every part of a deployment. I know that was one element of the Sun purchase, but there is so much other stuff included in the deal that it just seems like something's going to go horribly wrong.

[altivo]

That was the original intent of my post. While I know the buyer has the right to rebrand things, all too often when they do it I feel it's like a dog pissing on something to prove it's his. And, as it turns out, the marketing results are pretty much what you'd expect from that. Compaq contributed to the death of the Alpha, and Oracle seems to be preparing to bury all of Sun's open source products by trying to convert them back to proprietary code. I'm not sure that even Java will survive that treatment.

[treppenwolf]

Somehow, though, American corporations have become utterly wrapped up in the notion that appearance counts more than reality. Putting their name on something makes it "theirs" whether they originated or built the object or not.

That sounds very familiar.

"My name is HaOZAMANDYIUSut, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"


Seriously, thanks for the little historical tidbit. I have... well, not fond. Plenty of memories using Compaq and I was wondering whatever happened to them.

[altivo]

Compaq's own products weren't all that bad at one time. In the early 90s they were quite a good value, but then they began to pinch pennies in design and manufacturing so that by about 1998 or so, about half their computers seemed to arrive "dead in the box." That's pretty poor management and really bad quality control. I saw dead hard drives, dead power supplies, and even unconnected cables in new machines delivered right in the original unopened cartons. That's when I quit buying their products.

[avon_deer]

I remember some DEC equipment at Drax Power Station, when I did my work placement there...wow..that was 18 years ago now.

[altivo]

I managed VAX and PDP systems in the late 1980s. They were amazing little powerhouses and the VMS operating system was more stable and flexible than the IBM mainframe MVS we were running at the time. The Alpha was even more impressive, and became a contender against even Cray in scientific computing. Unfortunately, DEC fell down on marketing in spite of their obvious talent in the engineering field. The next generation of Alpha processor was already well down the line toward release when Compaq bought it out and killed it.