From: Atlant Schmidt [atlantnospam@mindspring.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2002 8:52 AM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Bob Palmer and the demise of DEC

  I  little while ago, a web search I was doing happened across the
  paper "Organizational Leadership and Shame" and I read the section
 about the decline and fall of Digital Equipment Corporation. The full
  paper is at:

    http://www.sba.oakland.edu/ispso/html/2000Symposium/Hunt2000.htm

  I wrote to the author with the comments I've included below. He
replied
  telling me that he is actually about to update the paper and would
welcome
  further anecdotes. I knew right where to turn... :-)

  If you'd like to comment to the author (adding stories or just saying
  "That Schmidt guy is clearly full of it!"), please reply here but also

  copy the author (as listed in the paper).

                                                       Atlant

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 James:

  I just happened upon your paper "Organizational Leadership and Shame"
  and read the section about Digital Equipment Corporation.

  I was amused by your comments about Bob Palmer and his relationship
  with the employees:

    ..."His relationship with employees was marked by distance
    and the apparent need to differentiate himself from his
    employees". ...


  "GQ Bob" was *NEVER* one of us, and he never wanted to be one
  of us. (I say this as someone who worked at Digital for 24+
  years before finally giving up). Let me tell you a triad of
  interlocking stories:

    I worked for a number of years in "The Mill", the ancestral
    home of Digital Equipment Corporation. Each day, I'd walk up
    the hill from the lower Thompson Street parking lot and into
    the Thompson Street lobby, past the very-near-to-the-door visitor
    parking area ("Blue Pass Required!"). Each day, I'd see a white
    Porsche 911 parked in visitor parking. After months of this, my
    interest had been piqued, so I asked Security who was the visitor
    that parked their Porsche here day after day. "Oh, that's no
    visitor; that's Bob Palmer's car. He's VP of manufacturing."
    "Isn't that *VISITORS ONLY* parking?" I asked?" I just got a
    shrug back. So I figured out where his office was in the Mill
    and took a walk down there. "Palatial" is the word that came
    to my mind; with huge office areas and practically no people.
    I formed my opinion of Bob Palmer that day, and it never changed
    the rest of the years I was at Digital.

    Bob's mini-palace was in sharp contrast to Ken Olsen's office
    area. While nicely appointed, it wasn't much different in character
    than any of the other areas of the Mill; nicer than some, rattier
    than others (Ken was, after all, the original Digital "Mill Rat").
    And yes, Ken had a private parking space near his office. It was
    our *ONE* officially-designated space in the whole company. But
    it was okay -- he built the company; he deserved it. And it gave
    us a way to keep tabs on him -- If the brown Pinto was parked
    there, he was in. (Ken was on the Board of Ford at the time.
    They wanted to give him a fancy Lincoln, but he chose a car
    more in keeping with the majority of Ford's customers. Later,
    the Pinto gave way to an Escort.)

    The Mill was great space. Centraly located in beautiful downtown
    Maynard, it had plenty of amenities: easy lunchtime access to
    lots of shops and restaurants, plenty of light, and falling
    lanolin in the summer (although that decreased year by year,
    replaced by the "Black Beauty" sandblasting grit used to re-furb
    area after area of the Mill). The Mill was a great place to work,
    and Ken used to like to brag about how inexpensive it was per
    square foot. Something must have happened, though, the moment
    Palmer took over. Palmer moved out to a building called MSO2
    where he built an even more-palatial palace of an office, complete
    with a private entrance for his worshipfulness. And the memos
    started circulating talking about how hideously expensive the
    Mill space was. (Sure. The mortgage was paid-off years ago. The
    taxes were low. The building had been cost-effective enough for
    a hundred years. But suddenly, it was too expensive.) So out went
    the Mill, tossed away with so much of Digital such as our data
    base division, our storage division, our semiconductor division,
    etc. The Mill's clock tower was, after all, only our corporate
    symbol. But GQ Bob hated it, along with any other signs of the
    peasants, so it had to go.


  Palmer *NEVER* understood the value contained in DEC. You're right:
  It had the *WORLD'S FASTEST MICROPROCESSOR* for many years
  running. It had VMS, which along with IBM's MVS was certainly one of
  the world's top two server operating systems. It had a wonderful
  version of Unix. And Palmer couldn't succeed with all these
  attributes and, in fact, degraded them and eventually threw them
  all away for cheap to his Texas buddies at Compaq. He ran Mostek
  into the ground and he did the same for Digital.

  He was *NEVER* one of us, and was damned proud of it!

  I finally threw in the towel in April of 2000 (during Compaq's
  reign), and came to work for a company that still resembles the
  old, succesful Digital. Started by peers of Ken Olsen, there are
  no palaces here and no fancy headquarters buildings with private
  entrances! Just lots of good people and a CEO that takes the
  elevator with us and goes to sit in a cube the same size as
  everyone's. Oddly enough, there are quite a few ex-Digits, too.


                                         Atlant G. Schmidt