DEC didn't support free open-source operating systems, though the very first of them, NetBSD, was ported to Alpha in 1995, followed by Linux, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. It was strange, at least, because these OS’s were (and still are) very popular in Alpha environment. Besides, their market value was obvious even for those days, and was increasing constantly. Also these operating systems performed no worse than the commercial Digital UNIX or OpenVMS, guaranteed hardware support comparable to Windows NT (much better from the today’s prospective), and offered many other benefits you may expect from open-source software. Mistake #8.
The list of DEC's strategic mistakes could be continued, including a complete disregard paid to the revolution of mainstream and budget personal computers, an over-diversified business model, and other less important and unrelated directly to Alpha architecture. So, we believe the final conclusion could sound as follows: DEC worked hard to make as much money as possible with Alpha architecture, but hardly did anything to help the architecture itself.
DEC's numerous failures during the late 1980s and early 1990s motivated the board of directors to suspend Olsen from managing the company in June 1992. They appointed Robert Palmer to take Olsen’s former position. He undertook a desperate attempt to reorganize the company structure and management in 1994, turning existing "matrix" model (when functionally different departments were working closely together on every decision) into traditional "vertical" (with authorities and responsibilities defined clearly from the very top to the very bottom of the structure). From 1991 to 1994, DEC's net losses exceeded $4 billion, including $2 billion just from July 1993 to June 1994 (including $1.2 billion spent on restructurization). The number of employees was cut down to 85,000. According to Palmer's program, the company should get rid of many divisions considered non-priority, so this is when the global sale began. In July 1994, the Storage Business Unit manufacturing disk and tape drives was sold to Quantum for $400 million, soon after the first models of thin-film hard drives (RA90 and RA92) had suffered a complete fiasco (they were late for the market because of numerous design flaws, and didn't survive the competition). In August 1994, the Database Software Unit was sold to Oracle for $100 million, also 7.8% share in Italian Olivetti was redeemed for $140 million those days. In November 1997, a deal was arranged to transfer the Network Product Business Unit to Cabletron for $430 million.
The fall of DEC was loud enough. The company sued Intel in May 1997, accusing them of infringements of 10 patents for Alpha architecture during their work on Pentium, Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors. Intel started a lawsuit against DEC in September 1997, claiming its 14 patents had been dishonored during DEC’s work on Alpha processors. The peace was reached finally on October 27, 1997: both companies took their complaints back. DEC licensed to Intel the manufacturing rights on all its hardware available (except Alpha segment) and agreed to support future IA-64 architecture. Intel in its turn purchased from DEC the factory in Hudson accompanied with designing centers in Jerusalem (Israel) and Austin (Texas) for $625 million, and agreed to manufacture DEC's Alpha processors in the future. Additionally, a 10-year cross licensing agreement for patents was signed. The deal was closed on May 18, 1998. By that time, Compaq had adopted DEC's primary divisions, including 38,000 employees (before the acquisition Compaq had only 32,000 employees of their own), though many of them were laid off in the very near future.
I have to stress that shortly before DEC's end and soon after that, many leading DEC engineers left for other employers: Derrick Meyer joined AMD to design K7. James Keller also went to AMD, but as a K8 architect. Daniel Leibholz was hired by Sun to create UltraSPARC V. Richard Sites, one of the primary Alpha architects for all these years, also abandoned the ship. Intel was far not so lucky from this prospective: StrongARM architecture, inherited from DEC, seemed to be at a dead end, because no one of those chief architects who designed StrongARM-110, namely Daniel Dobberpuhl, Richard Witek, Gregory Hoeppner and Liam Madden, decided to join the new owner. Moreover, Witek's entire team, which was working in Austin on the second generation of StrongARM core, resigned completely, so Intel had to design the core literally from the scratch, involving their own engineers who were working on i960 before.
