Alpha Can Live Without Microsoft

Joe Vigneau writes "The Boston Globe has an article that says the Alpha, even now that Microsoft will no longer support it, won't dissappear off the face of the earth. Here's one quote: 'The market has basically been pretty clear that the market for us is the Linux space,' Borkowski said."

Comments

Re:This is complete nonsense.

[SoftwareJanitor]

Don't blame Compaq for making a smart (but belated) business decision. NT on Alpha wasn't selling well (some estimates place it as low as a mere 5% of Alpha sales). Compaq was spending millions of dollars a year in development of Alpha NT. If the 100 people who were let go were each making only $75,000 a year, plus benefits, then Compaq will probably save close to 10 million dollars a year on this alone. Compaq was also spending millions of dollars a year in advertising Alpha NT. They obviously spent much more on advertising for Alpha NT than they did for Linux Alpha, OpenVMS and Tru64 put together (based on what I've seen for page count, placement and number of publications), and got far less return. Even if they retarget some of those advertising dollars to other Alpha OSes, they should see a significantly better return on those advertising dollars.

A thought....

[jd]

Now, all Compaq has to do is get the cost of the Alpha down to something that mere mortals can afford -without- taking out two extra morgages and winning the lottery.

The Alpha is a good chip, and I'm not surprised that they think it can survive on the Linux, *BSD and Dec Unix markets. Those three probably made up 99% of their sales, anyway.

But if they can get the chip to cost less, so that home users can afford it, we could be on the brink of a major revolt in the computer market. With no NT/9x there, Microsoft is closed out of any market Compaq forge for the Alpha. And if that market starts creeping into the home, that's going to cause a major shift in the industry.