“Mistakes were made.” You made what turned out to be a wise decision, but Compaq completely fluffed what were potentially the most valuable parts of DEC’s IP, namely the Alpha and OpenVMS. Mind you, after selling the Alpha architecture to Intel, we were foolish enough to design the DL590 around the Itanic.
HP has been dilatory with OpenVMS as well - outsourced the development a couple of years ago, and are now getting around to an X86 port. Their biggest boner was getting rid of Nijmegen and outsourcing logistics to FedEx. Instead of having probably the most effective logistics organisation around responding directly to the customers’ SLAs, we ended up trying fulfill our SLA commitments through an organisation that had its own (different) SLA with us.
