In the 1990s, especially latter half, Digital's leadership went on divestment-oriented business management, and managed to ultimately divest the company of its future.
Not really - Alpha was quite successful. My personal suspicion is that if instead of chasing quick returns through divestment that had worked on keeping a portfolio of products that drove sales for each other (for example, Rdb which to my understanding was fairly successful in some areas) the results might have been different.
There's reason why so many places kept to Digital gear even after Compaq mishandling, then the Itanium and HP days, and not all of those were customers that had problematic rewrites blocking any migration (like customers dependant on VMS).
I am still not sure what the killer app was for the Alpha. Other than OpenVMS/Alpha to provide the business continuity for existing VMS customers, DEC was not really all that successful with the Alpha from that perspective.
Yes, Windows NT Alpha did take off initially and was the go-to non-Intel platform for CPU hungry apps, but it was expensive and then Intel caught up with multi-processor Pentium Pro systems and that was the end of the Alpha.
Sun SPARC/UltraSPARC was effectively a hardware appliance to run the Oracle database (and SAP). SGI/MIPS covered the 3D graphics market. IBM POWER was the hardware to run DB2 and other IBM wares ported from mainframes for customers who did not want to have to deal with JCL and other hairy stuff. HP PA-RISC was an enigma that ran something although not that many people were sure what exactly it was. HP Superdome was pretty rad tho – I worked on a project for a telco that had purchased a 128 CPU Superdome to run their billing system on (ironically, it was IBM who had sold them on the Superdome). HP-UX before v11.21 had been buggy AF and overall an abomination.
Yes, Alpha could run Oracle as well, plus other things… they never seem to have taken off tho, and Alpha was quickly relegated to an IP garage sale.
From the technology perspective, Alpha was a resounding success, at least in the beginning.
The hardware appliance for Oracle was Itanium on HP-UX. Oracle pushing it as recommended platform until their Sun acquisition is pretty much what kept it afloat after introduction - if the billing system used Oracle RAC as backend, it might be the reason for using Superdome.
From my perspective, Alpha had quite wide user base, not as much as Sun which seemed to have figured desktop unix sales way better than everyone else. I know some segments tended to buy Digital because if you knew what you wanted, Digital would let you simply order it - disappearance of that approach, forcing everyone to go through a sales rep, has been anecdotally pointed to me as why a bunch of places migrated post Compaq acquisition.
> hI am still not sure what the killer app was for the Alpha
It was a general purpose processor, talking about a single killer app doesn't make sense. It was designed for speed and expandability and as such seemed very successful.
