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long to get an acceptable mean time between failure rate of their first thin-film tech-
nology disk drive that the competition had released smaller cheaper disks. This was
one of the largest development projects in the company history and included a number
of new technologies in the one product. DEC made a similar error in the VAX 9000
design where they again introduced three new technologies at once which caused
delays in product shipment.
DEC missed two disruptive technologies in the 1980's which could have kept them
on the next S-curve. The company missed the advent of the workstation by focussing
on the IBM market anticipating the VAX9000 as their IBM killer. This allowed SUN
amongst others to take what was once DEC's traditional market. DEC realised very
late that the workstation market was important and started a workstation engineering
group. This forced them into using a third party chip to challenge the competition and
to cancel their own in-house project for a RISC chip codenamed PRISM. This, for a
time, gave them a successful workstation and market share but it was short lived as
they decided that an in-house chip was needed and started the Alpha project which
confused their MIPS customers and led to a loss of marketshare. The other disruptive
technology was the PC where DEC tried to create three products to compete in the
marketplace when one would have given them a lead had they realised. They set up
three competing groups to build a PC, the Robin, running both DOS and CP/M, a
proprietary system, the Professional, and a word processing system. The groups didn't
appear to know of each others existence and did not use industry standard parts so
were not compatible with each other or the IBM PC standard. The sales force were
confused as to which was the PC competitor and missed out on sales of the Robin PC
by putting the Professional forward as DEC's main offering.
DEC is quoted in Bower and Christensen's article on 'Catching the Wave' [8] as
almost completely missing the disruptive technology of the personal computer. They
blame arrogance, tired executive blood, poor planning and strangely 'staying close to
their customer'. Many however contend that DEC were not in a position to take on
the PC market as their processes were aligned to medium volume, high margin prod-
ucts and not the high volume low margin market. Had they recognised the work-
station market then there might not have been a crisis of confidence a few years later.
In the mid 1990s there were two other disruptive technologies that DEC had a
chance to lead the market with had the company not been fighting for survival and not
focussing on building for growth. The first was fast networks linked to the require-
ments of the internet where DEC was in a lead position in gigabit technology until
Palmer sold off the network business in 1977 to concentrate on 'core' products. The
second was the internet and all that that brought. DEC was the leader in internet busi-
ness, forming an internet business unit under Rose Ann Giordano and creating some
excellent products. DEC, according to staff interviewed, were aware of the 'wave',
DEC management was always talking about riding the wave. However as figure 7
shows graphically they missed the wave of the 1980's, the Alpha S-curve was late in
starting and they didn't really get back on track until the internet wave of the mid
1990's. Unfortunately, by this time the board had removed the CEO installing some-
one who didn't understand the internet and who was in the process of finding a
merger/buyer for the company. Had he taken time to look at what was happening in
1997 things might have been different. It is clear that DEC had once again got back
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