| A friend of Mine in IBM Australia, pointed out a similar plan to me. They
had a number of Marketing people who were "marginally" beyond requirements.
As with most employees, the cost of employment was close to 3 times their
base salary (say 50,000). IBM helped them start their own consultancy,
consulting Back to IBM. Their hourly rate went up, their utilization was
lower. They made more money, IBM Spent less and got more for it. All were
happy.
The "transition" organization seems to be concentrating on locating people
in other corporations. Perhaps a few "mini-startups" funded by Digital may
be in order.
q
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| re.2
Dick,
That idea is already beeing circled around.
There was this "white book" describing "elite support" for "classic
products". The conclusion was basically that the PDP world, classic
products, cannot be supported to customer expectations nor cost-
effectively within the "new" DEC.
Logistics throw away precious spare parts because of low turn-around,
First line service cannot motivate people to stay skilled in "old
stuff"
Existing software skills are hidden and difficult to locate.
Engineering opportunities (e.g interface new periphals to replace
unrepairable old ones) are lost because of the high overhead
(worldwide maintainability requirements etc..)
These sample problems led the author to propose "elite service"
to be created. Sort of a traditional, small DEC within the big.
When I read the proposal a few monthes ago, "packages", "redundancy"
etc... became the hot topics of discussion.
So I thought:
Maybe we can solve both problems (too many people, PDP support)
with one solution:
It just happens now that as PDP11's (and 8's, 15's...) have matured,
so have a few people. Why not match things.
Folks who enter the 50ies just need to look forward to a 10 to 15
professional career ahead before reaching formal retirement age.
The PDP business might just have the same live-span.
Therefore instead of offering "packages" it might be wiser to
offer "PDP business" under some corporate umbrella.
It's a win-win-win situation:
Customers win the resources and service they need
DIGITAL wins by "throwing away" less money and still reducing head-count.
People win by beeing able to do and get paid for what they like(d)
to do.
DIGITAL might be the only computer company beeing able to do this,
as:
1- The early days customers where mostly technical OEM's
2- Many industrial control applications built by them are still
operational and need not necessarily to be migrated because
of availability of "UNIX hot boxes"
3- Enormous software investment hinders migration
4- Up to now, DIGITAL has a reputation of beeing able to support
"whatever has been sold in the past"
What do you think ?
/fred
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