DEC always saw itself as the scrappy, sleek underdog in IBM's big iron market - an engineering company making relatively affordable tools for engineers, academi

DEC always saw itself as the scrappy, sleek underdog in IBM's big iron market - an engineering company making relatively affordable tools for engineers, academics, and other qualified professionals. Where "affordable" meant six or seven figures instead of seven or eight. Which was fine while it lasted. But with VAX, the mini market became corporatised, inward-looking, nostalgic, even arrogant. Big-iron hardware had much higher internal prestige than VLSI - unfortunate, because DEC's VLSI people were the best in the world, and the systems software people weren't far behind. DEC had absolutely no concept of VLSI-based mass-market commodity computing - no idea how to design it, build it, distribute it, market it, or even imagine it. The Rainbow was as close as it got, and that was a disaster. So even with Alpha it had no chance. Prism would barely have changed that, because the problem was a failure of imagination in upper management. BigCos should always have an internal team of annoying curious generalists to challenge orthodoxy and report annually on "What trends and opportunities are we missing?" Sometimes the C-Suite has the talent to do that, but more often it just doesn't.