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onto the S-curve and were well placed to ride the next wave. DEC had created Alta
Vista in its Western Research Lab as a way to use the power of the Alpha processor
and had already established the Alpha as a force in internet business suppliers such as
Amazon because of its power. This was mainly on Unix based systems however
rather than Open VMS.
Product waves
pdp8
ex pdp8
pdp11
ex pdp11
pdp11780
ex pdp11780
alpha
Internet
yea r
Fig. 7. New product 'waves'
Russ Jones in a chapter of Cronin's topic [9] looked at DEC's internet business and
its leadership position in late 1994. DEC was the first fortune 500 company to have its
own web site when it opened the first commercial home page on the internet in Octo-
ber 1993. They had the majority of the business server market in the internet arena
with Amazon as a major customer. When they released AltaVista it was an instant hit
and the name went from nothing to worldwide fame in six months being better known
than DEC itself. It was the search engine used by Yahoo, cementing its position as
search engine of choice. DEC produced the first internet firewall product, the first
tunnelling software in 1991 and was well ahead of the competition.
When the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came to DEC with an
offer of joining with AltaVista for $1 million, DEC's response was negative due to a
'not invented here' attitude and senior management preparing for the sale of the com-
pany. This was certainly another opportunity missed for DEC. Palmer didn't under-
stand what he had in AltaVista. He didn't understand the potential of the internet,
valuing AltaVista at $0 when the sale to Compaq went through. In 1999 Compaq sold
AltaVista to CMGI for $2.3 billion. Bell in his appendix to Schein [1] stated that
Internet business products were perfect for DEC, they had all the pieces including
servers, software and networking, however they didn't understand how to organise to
engage in a new market.
DEC, IBM and HP are all exemplars quoted by Peters and Waterman [10] as or-
ganisations with structures and strategies that are the ones to follow. Yet by 1990 all
three were in deep trouble suggesting that the study by Peters and Waterman [10] was
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