Conference 7.286::digital

    
    there was a program on TV the other day about this Japanese company (i
    forgot which one, it was one of the big ones), they said on the program
    that they have a 50 and 100 year plans in that company. can you imagine
    that? a 50 year plan for a company?

    i think we in DEC should have some people whose job is nothing but
    try to envision what DECeees will be like in the next 10,20, or even 30
    years, i think .0 makes a good point, we should start thinking about
    long term goals. 
    
    if i may be bold enough and suggest the following steps towards this
    goal:

    1. build a 30 year DEC master plan.
    
    2. from the above, make an immediate 5 year plan that will take us
       in the general direction of the 30 year master plan in step 1.
    
    3. at the end of the 5 year plan, re evaluate the master 30 year plan ,
       and make a new 30 year plan (since 5 years have elapsed, we need
       to go 5 years ahead in the future).
    
    4. make a new 5 year plan based on the updateed new 30 year master plan.
    
    5. continuously gather data from the field, and create an AI based
       data base to store rules and data in it to assess the future with, use
       this system , call it DECfuture, at regular intervals, i suggest 1 per
       year big wood meeting for this, use decisions from this yearly meeting
       to make the new 5 year plan at the end of the 5 year period.
    
    6. no changes are allowed in the 5 year plan once it is started,
       changes will only be incorporated in the next 5 year plane and the new
       30 year master plan.
    
    7. the 30 year master plan shall only be approved by the board of 
       directors and the chairman of the board, as well the 5 year plan.
    
    8. meeting for the the initial 30 year plan will be held in an open hall and
       representatives of all parties concerned will be invited. once the 30
       year master plan is written, every DECeee will be able to look at it
       and it should be made public.


        \nasser

    re .0
    
    your'trying to understand our current malaise. Well here's the newest
    from a myriad of examples. Who ever has travelled the Internet
    knows that you can get virtually any information you can imagine.
    
    Now keep in mind that security people in this company deny us 
    any acces to information server/services( WWW, Gopher etc.) outside the
    company when you read the following article from vogon news.
    
    
    
    
 Digital - Worldwide info environment ready to move from lab to products
        {Livewire, Worldwide News, 22-Oct-93}
   "We found a snowball on top of the hill and kicked it down," explained Win
 Treese, researcher at Digital's Cambridge (Mass.) Research Lab, at a workshop
 on the Worldwide Web held there on Oct. 12.  
   Technology for easy-to-use global information access is now ready to move
 out of the lab for incorporation in products and services. The "snowball"
 refers to the enormous response from people inside Digital who are equipped to
 experience the information environment which the Web and its client software,
 Mosaic, have opened up on the Internet and which researchers have creatively
 implemented within Digital.
   At the workshop, representatives from engineering, IM&T, marketing and
 services saw demonstrations of this technology and discussed ways in which it
 can and should be embedded in future products and services. 
   Basically, the Worldwide Web (WWW) enables files and sections of files on
 different host systems to be linked to one another, so the user can follow
 threads of associated thought from one system to another, quickly and
 smoothly, and can perform useful worldwide searches to retrieve targeted
 information.  It was developed to deal with the information overload problems
 of the Internet.
   The Internet itself has grown from a small assemblage of anarchic,
 government-subsidized networks focused on education and research to a vast,
 increasingly commercial web, encompassing thousands of company as well as
 educational networks and serving an estimated 20 million users.  It is growing
 at a rate of 6% per month in the U.S. and 7% per month outside the U.S., and
 now carries more than seven terabytes of information a month.  (A terabyte is
 1,000 gigabytes, and a gigabyte 1,000 megabytes.  A megabyte is about the size
 of a 1,000-page book.)   
   The usefulness of these mountains of information residing on an estimated
 1.7 million interconnected computers has been limited by human ability to
 navigate through it and find and retrieve what is needed when it is needed.
 In 1989, in response to the needs of physicists, researchers at CERN, a
 research institute in Switzerland, developed and refined the Worldwide Web, a
 global "hypertext" environment.  This spring the National Center for
 Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released Mosaic -- client software that
 allows users to point-and-click their way quickly through that Worldwide Web.
 UNIX, PC and Macintosh versions are available now.
   Mosaic is "freely available" on the Internet.  In other words, individuals
 and institutions who want it for non-commercial purposes can simply copy the
 files and use them for free.  But companies that wish to embed them in
 products need to negotiate licensing agreements.  
   In combination, the Worldwide Web and Mosaic let a user select a section of
 an on-line map, diagram or photo to get more detail or explanatory text, and
 to move from text to text or even to hypertext-linked audio and video files
 simply by clicking on a mouse.  The opportunities are obvious for education
 and healthcare and retail markets (with on-line searchable and interactive
 catalogs).  And Digital's customers will need services and systems integration
 as well as hardware and commercial-quality software to implement these new 
 capabilities. 
   The demonstrations included showing Digital's product literature and related
 information in easily searchable form, with hypertext links to background and
 reference documents.  This is available now to customers on the Internet who
 have WWW capability.  The presentation itself was done using WWW technology to
 display slides and move to different elements of the live demo.  Separate
 internally developed software, running over Digital's IP network, provided a
 video link with meeting participants in Palo Alto, Calif.
   For further information, contact Andrew Payne, DTN 259-6657 (CRL::PAYNE), or
 Win Treese, DTN 259-6615 (CRL::TREESE). 

 UNIX is a registered trademark licensed exclusively by X/Open Co. Ltd.
 Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer.


	
    
    
    	This is real funny stuff, isn't it -:)
    
    							-helmut
    
 	






<--More                        VNS COMPUTER NEWS                                

 ... was that our colleagues in Corporate Research have ==>OPENED<== the way
 for DIGITAL folk to pass through the "security firewall" (that justifiably
 <imho> protects us from those few in the outside world who might maliciously
 attack our network) and to actually venture out onto the World-Wide Web, to
 begin to browse its burgeoning wonders...
    
 To THESE eyes, that CRA work is a symptom of "NEW-think" rather than of the
 older, blindered avoidance of outside ideas that tended to dampen our
 collective intellectual metabolic rate.  Check it out, I bet you'll find that
 "the water's fine" and that CyberSurfing will widen your horizons and make
 your own work for DIGITAL more cost-effective.
  /-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\
  a-> "Catch the wave" of the FLOOD of info on the Internet's World-Wide Web!
  b->           "Surf's up!"  (Noah WEBster, ~6000 B.C.)
    (-: b-> was excerpted from the "Mosaic Tradition" - with a few errors :-)
  \-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/-\-/

    See SOFBAS::INTERNET_TOOLS for kit locations, documentation, and other
    information on Internet, Mosaic and WWW...

re Note 2736.4 by DRDAN::KALIKOW:

>         -< Au contraire, Helmut of .3 -- imho, that posting's point... >-
> 
>  ... was that our colleagues in Corporate Research have ==>OPENED<== the way
>  for DIGITAL folk to pass through the "security firewall" (that justifiably
>  <imho> protects us from those few in the outside world who might maliciously
>  attack our network) and to actually venture out onto the World-Wide Web, to
>  begin to browse its burgeoning wonders...
>     
>  To THESE eyes, that CRA work is a symptom of "NEW-think" rather than of the
>  older, blindered avoidance of outside ideas that tended to dampen our
>  collective intellectual metabolic rate.  Check it out, I bet you'll find that
>  "the water's fine" and that CyberSurfing will widen your horizons and make
>  your own work for DIGITAL more cost-effective.

        But Dan, gateways through the firewall are not "NEW-think"!

        I truly appreciate, as you well know, what the folks at CRL
        did in establishing this new gateway.  I do not consider that
        "NEW-think" on their part, however, since openness has always
        been a trait of theirs.  Rather, they worked within the
        "old-think" of the guardians of corporate security -- which
        hasn't changed and is not changed by the fact of what CRL has
        done.

        Our access to these internet information sources still isn't
        as good as outside the firewall.  For example, it is
        considered completely legitimate for these information
        sources to use non-standard TCP/IP port numbers, however, the
        gateway will only allow access to standard port numbers; 
        additional port numbers still require lengthy security review
        per port number.  Also, many of the more interactive
        services, as well as some of the older (but more valuable due
        to their wealth of information) sources require telnet access
        which is integrated into the Web via Mosaic but which is
        still blocked from general Digital use.

        There is also the risk of a new form of "closedness" with
        respect to Digital's internet access.  As the "weather map"
        copying incident illustrated, other kinds of objections may
        be made to unrestricted Digital access to the internet.  At a
        time when corporate telecom is planning service reductions,
        there is a very real chance that such access will be closed
        on claims of expense control.

        Bob

    
    
    
         Can anyone really predict this stuff? I look at it like this, 17
    years ago if you talked about 1 gigabyte of data on a single disk
    drive, it would have been viewed as a "VERY" large piece of hardware.
    Today it's on a 3 1/2" platter.
    
         What I'm getting to is we tend to think of things as we understand
    them today. Who would have ever thought you could get 1.68 million
    transistors on a chip at 200 MHz, just ten years ago?
    
    
                                        Phil...   

Re: .3, et al

Won't this lead to widespread abuse of our precious network resources?
Corporate Telecom had better put a stop to this pronto or we will have
another fiasco like the weather map debacle.

Lee

    It is difficult to predict what will happen.  Many times we are flat
    out wrong.
    
    On the other hand, there is a logical process that informs the
    progression of technologies.  Somebody had to think of these
    developments because they exist today.  In the development of business
    plans there are always several scenarios possible.  In thinking these
    through in advance, companies are better able to deal with the
    "unprdictable" when it occurs.  Shell Oil, for example, came out of the
    Arab Oil embargoes very successfully when compared to its peers.  Those
    that didn't anticipate these events did not fare as well.  Shell
    consciously developed several different "what if" plans in great detail
    and therefore was ready to handle the crisis when it occurred.
    
    So, even though there are limits to what we can predict or anticipate,
    it is very helpful to think through as many different possibilities as
    our imaginations can create.  Remember, this company was created in
    someone's imagination first.
    was

re .1

But we *had* a thirty-year plan.  It said that we'd be able to 
keep selling VMS for ever, that no-one would ever want Unix, 
that PCs were just toys...

        .10

    but \Dave, the 30-year-plan is supposed to be updated as i have indicated
    in my overall strategy in .1, it should be continuously be updated and
    a new plan made up. it seems the one you are talking about was not
    updated. if the 30-year-plan is not updated to reflect the current
    trends, it is a good as chicken soup (pardon the expression) as far as 
    iam concerned.

    \nasser

Technology forcasting has been around for a long time.  It's a methodology by
which you try to predict the life of a given technology, and when replacement
technologies will be economically feasible to replace it, TO SATISFY MARKET
REQUIREMENTS.  It is an iterative process, periodically requiring updating based
on new technical/market/social information.  This goes hand in hand with a 30 or
50 year business plan, based on using technology to serve your customers.  It
also requires periodic updating.  (I'm sure Japanese plans from 50 years ago,
while in the middle of WWII, have been greatly modified over the years!)

IMHO, I think we (Digital) have missed the last part of the equation...the voice
of the customer.  But I also think we are realizing how important it is to our
survival.  I hope the necessary paradigm shifts, and the tools necessary to
support these changes come quickly enough.

    I'm happy to see this conversation.  Now that I see a lot more people
    illustrating the complexities of our internal processes on the wall,
    I'm getting some confidence that we are going to become skilled at
    designing and managing our processes.  And the next thing I see weak or
    actually missing, is a generous vision--a compelling view of what we
    are here to contribute.
    
    I'd like to suggest however that for a 17 year view, it isn't so much a
    matter of predicting, it's more a matter of choosing what we want to
    create.  Digital is big enough and talented enough to make things
    happen.  We don't have to be mere passive observers.  So when I hear
    things said like "see what the market requires" I shudder.
    
    Let me give you a kind of broken armed example.  There's this farmer I
    know out in Harvard Mass., see.  He's from the old school, no
    gene-splicing or anything, but he's been splicing fruit trees nearly
    his whole career.  Today he has a new product.  It tastes like a
    Macintosh apple, only a little sweeter.  It looks like an orange, and
    if you hold it close to your nose it has a bit of a whiff like an
    apricot.  But you know what?  He went to Boston and looked all over the
    Marketplace.  There are apples for sale there, and apricots, and
    oranges.  But for what he has to sell:  there's no Market for that.
    
    
    See, "market" is a backward-looking phenomenon, at least it is in the
    context we're considering here, a 17 year view.  "The Market" is just
    the impression made by past innovations.
    
    
    So I'd rather not have us think what the "market" will demand.  What I
    want to know is:  what will human beings need, and which of those needs
    will our company commit to fulfilling?  Then the people we set ourself
    up to be prepared to serve will become our customers.  And the means by
    which we come to terms will in retrospect be viewed as our market.
    
    
    Here are some needs I see people having already, that nobody in the
    computer industry is filling.  I don't know whether Digital should, but
    they look to me like long term business opportunities for somebody.
    
    1	The sun should never set on a project, if the project is being done
    	by a company upon whom the sun never sets.  Digital for example. 
    We should be able to begin a project in Valbonne, have it carried
    further later that day in Spit Brook, have it continued on later that
    day in Palo Alto, have it carried further later that day in Bombay, and
    have it carried further that same day in Valbonne, though the Valbonne
    people experience this as their *next* day.
    
    2	Teams should be able to display their work on a wall if they want.
    	Today, the biggest commercial displays barely exceed 1 million
    pixels.  But a team can co-create at least 10 million pixels between
    breakfast and lunch (I frequently lead teams to do this in a process
    called "Quality Function Deployment" for example.)  They have to use
    big sheets of paper, rather than any computing equipment.  And if they
    want to edit the result *as* a team some months later, they have to use
    a huge printout of some kind, they can't do it the way you'd edit
    something small enough to be displayed on a screen.
    
    3	When I'm driving between Digital locations, someone will be wanting
    	to change my calendar.  But either I've got the official version of
    my schedule on the seat beside me or in my briefcase;  or it's on my
    desk where someone else can change it but it's an "OffLine Transaction
    Processing" event and one time in every three something gets fouled up
    between the various out of synch copies.  Calendars ought to be *On*
    Line Transaction Processing systems.  Which implies:  radio
    connections.  There's gotta be a way where *one* copy gets *all* the
    changes, and I have access to it and those I empower to modify it have
    access to it, and those I empower to read-but-not-modify have access to
    it, and I can design complex rules if I want to for who gets to see
    what types of entry etc.  All of the world's busy on-the-road people
    seem to need this, but all of us at the moment have to patch together
    some lashup that doesn't really meet our needs well.
    
    
    These are needs people have here and now.  Not everybody has these
    needs.  But a lot do, and the numbers in all three cases seem to be
    growing worldwide.  Digital could have a vision to do something about
    any of the three (or maybe even two out of the three) and make a real
    difference in customers' lives.
    						Russ

re Note 2736.13 by ICS::DOANE:

>     See, "market" is a backward-looking phenomenon, at least it is in the
>     context we're considering here, a 17 year view.  "The Market" is just
>     the impression made by past innovations.

        I like this a lot -- well put!

>     So I'd rather not have us think what the "market" will demand.  What I
>     want to know is:  what will human beings need, and which of those needs
>     will our company commit to fulfilling?  

        This underscores that there MUST be an element of risk in our
        decisions.  Our search to find the market and then meet it is
        one symptom of risk-aversion.  You are not guaranteed that if
        you build it they will come, but you must be willing to build
        it before they come.

        Bob

Re: a few back

I read some of the material of Shell's future planning. The main important 
issue there was, that while future planning is often made based on current
statistics curves in economy, consumption or whatever, in real life things
don't happen that way. Unpredictable incidents in something, which is not
necessarily seen as even closely related, can change the whole trend almost 
overnight.

In fact, most "conventional" planning is based on current (past?) knowledge
of vendors and customers alike while "what ifs" could possibly create something,
where the company can be ahead of it's competitors.

Some funny what ifs in our industry could be something like:

What if software is produced,priced and sold like books today? Is it still 
profitable? What kind of service would customers buy for that? Who are the 
customers? What would be the delivery technology?

What if the "Information Highway" or whatever it's called really takes off.
What are all the things it can be used for? How will that business evolve?
What kind of components are needed for that? What is the impact to products?
What is the impact to buying habits of customers? In think these last questions 
are something, Bill Gates spoke about in some of the interviews.

That kind of questions created Ford, first Volkswagen, first PDP, first Apple.

--Ritva 

    
    
    	re .14
    
    	I totally agree with you, Bob.
    
    	Here's another example that makes me think sceptic.
    	VIRTUAL REALTY is almost for sure nothing the large base
    	of Digital customers is interested in and demanding for.
    	Yet, I think it's foreseeable a technology where the big
    	money will be in a few years. 
    	Obviously we'd have a fast enough chips as a base technology.
    	Now Michael Good who drove small and almost unsupported
    	VR projects within Digital left the company few months ago,
    	and obviously not because he thought he found too good
    	working conditions here.
    
    							-helmut
    		
    	
    
    
     

    What the future will be like ?
    
    	The 2000 century will be the globalization century.   Countries
    will become closer and needs/interrelationships will be crucial.
    Countries will produce what they do better, therefore the relationship
    between them will become more important.   Therefore computers will
    become more important as data will be shared globally/simultaneously.
    Portables and High End systems will be growing with the portable-
    wireless market having an incredible growth.
    
    	Portable computers are going to be the order of the day.  Services
    are going to be the other trend.    You will be able to send/receive
    mail messages on your writswatch portable computer that will be linked
    wireless to a massive data base.    You will be able to find personal
    data (medical, physical,cultural,etc), business data, recreational
    among many others.
    
    	Computers will be specialized (medical, lawyers, businessperson,
    etc) because the price will be so low that, as with calculators, you
    now can afford to have a specialized computer.   If you need more
    information, you hook-up to the database and search for it.
    Part of the enbedded services will be: telephone, video-conferencing,
    fax, mail, music, entertainment, airline information, hotel
    information, stocks, bonds, mortgage, bank-statements,
    deposits/withdrawals, payment of water, electricity, gas, credit
    cards,automobiles, etc.
    
    	The low end is going to continue growth in the laser/digital
    devices with wireless technology.   The high end with fault tolerant
    massively parallel systems that will control the data for other smaller
    systems to be fed.
                                                

RE: .7  -< Who knows???? >-
Can anyone really predict this stuff?

  IMHO: Yes! Gordon Bell is one who knows.  See his book "High Tech Ventures..."
  That book looks like a continuation of his talk "Heuristics for 
  Building Great Products", which is still available in both text and
  video (UMATIC) form from the Digital Library Network.

  Make sure you at least look at the last pages of the book.  It's 
  full of technology predictions.  I think you'll be amazed at how
  technology improvements follow very smooth curves -- hence, are 
  predictable.  

Re: .17

I as a consumer don't like the idea of specialized end user systems, especially
not the idea of specialized portable systems. I would like my portable PC to be 
small enough to be convenient to carry around and big enough to have an easy to 
understand, easy to remember entry mechanism. It should be a dictionary/translator
for several languages, a calendar, have a modem, which can connect to mobile and
standard digital or analog phones, have all normal PC tools for office, have enough
storage capacity to avoid too frequent requirements to connect to central data-
bases, have a good screen, because I have weak eyes...... Of course, all the new 
things, I don't know anything about today need to be there too. All this needs to
be under one cover, because I find it a nuisance to carry multiple small gadgets 
with me. But perhaps this kind of a general tool will be one speciality for people
who don't enjoy playing with toys ;-).


Re: .18

Technology improvements may follow smooth curves. I believe the real innovation 
comes, when you notice that some of these curves have reached a level, where you
can build new things with new type of technology combinations. Some of the curves
may (and do) reach a saturation point until enough happens in other areas to
justify the usage of all technological possibilities. We have now such a limiting
factor in wide area telecommunications. Price and often capacity of telecommuni-
cations is too high to allow e.g. LAN type client server functionality over wide
area networks. That is not a technology limitation. Cost, and because of that, 
lack of will to build the new infrastructure and price it at the level, where
usage is feasible, has been the limiting factor. There are plenty of similar things
around.

Some technologies just die, because, at the time, when there is sufficient 
justification for usage for them, other technologies have run past them. Any
of you remember, what happend with bubble memories... Or perhaps I'm too
old :-(.

I haven't read Gordon Bell's book, but I'm sure he must have said something 
about above things as well.

    re: .19
    
    And software will automatically make sure the text fits on whatever
    display device is being used, without the author needing to worry about
    it :-)
    
           <<< HUMANE::DISK$DIGITAL:[NOTES$LIBRARY]DIGITAL.NOTE;1 >>>
                        -< The Digital way of working >-
================================================================================
Note 2736.19                      Digital, 2010                         19 of 19
IDEFIX::SIREN                                        37 lines  27-OCT-1993 08:18
                         -< What is the sum of curves >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Re: .17

    I as a consumer don't like the idea of specialized end user systems,
    especially not the idea of specialized portable systems. I would like
    my portable PC to be  small enough to be convenient to carry around and
    big enough to have an easy to  understand, easy to remember entry
    mechanism. It should be a dictionary/translator for several languages,
    a calendar, have a modem, which can connect to mobile and standard
    digital or analog phones, have all normal PC tools for office, have
    enough storage capacity to avoid too frequent requirements to connect
    to central data- bases, have a good screen, because I have weak
    eyes...... Of course, all the new  things, I don't know anything about
    today need to be there too. All this needs to be under one cover,
    because I find it a nuisance to carry multiple small gadgets  with me.
    But perhaps this kind of a general tool will be one speciality for
    people who don't enjoy playing with toys ;-).


Re: .18

    Technology improvements may follow smooth curves. I believe the real
    innovation  comes, when you notice that some of these curves have
    reached a level, where you can build new things with new type of
    technology combinations. Some of the curves may (and do) reach a
    saturation point until enough happens in other areas to justify the
    usage of all technological possibilities. We have now such a limiting
    factor in wide area telecommunications. Price and often capacity of
    telecommuni- cations is too high to allow e.g. LAN type client server
    functionality over wide area networks. That is not a technology
    limitation. Cost, and because of that,  lack of will to build the new
    infrastructure and price it at the level, where usage is feasible, has
    been the limiting factor. There are plenty of similar things around.

    Some technologies just die, because, at the time, when there is
    sufficient  justification for usage for them, other technologies have
    run past them. Any of you remember, what happend with bubble
    memories... Or perhaps I'm too old :-(.

    I haven't read Gordon Bell's book, but I'm sure he must have said
    something  about above things as well.
    

    re: .17
    
    >> The 2000 century will be the globalization century. << !!!!!
           ^^^^
    
    That is if the GLOBE is still here!!!
    
    Wow!!!!!! I quess we're headed for a silicon drought real soon!! :^)
    
    rick