CompuServe Messages

As you allude, Alphas are really competing in a different market (by design or accident – don't know which). They are at the low end of the market for SMP – which is about the high end of NT. Now, most people I know of do not thing Alpha when they think NT. If they are doing small SMP work (100 user RDBMS, for example) and it happens to require NT, they usually do not think DEC. Alternatives are the RS6000 and related servers. When you think – in this market – of small non-NT servers, you think unix, i.e., RS6000, etc. Again, not Alpha. Smaller systems (unixware, unix, WFW, NT non-power user, etc) are generally the market inhabited by the intel-chained masses, who would know an alpha if it bit them. Finally, the larger multiprocessing base are looking at bigger systems than the Alpha can handle. I know sparcs are old hat, but I would really like to see a DEC Alpha try to keep pace with a 20-processor SparcServer 2000. Beyond that, the pyramids, sequents, etc. will leave the Alpha in the dust. Thus, the only market DEC has for the Alpha, is the just-a-little-beyond Pentium market. Those people are generally the ones who will try to eek out just-a-little-more than the Pentium can handle, and survive until P6 arrives – and will never try an Alpha.