DEC has been telling Reuters that it doesn’t regard IBM’s new ES/9000 mainframes as a threat, since they seem to be targeted specifically at IBM’s own customer-base and will pose more of a problem for the plug-compatible makers such as Fujitsu, Amdahl and Hitachi: in particular DEC believes that IBM’s Sysplex strategy (connecting different system images via clock synchronisation) locks users into IBM hardware and locks them out of the plug-compatible market; DEC is also contemptuous of IBM’s attempts to have increased compatibility within its systems and wonders aloud how an MS-DOS user gets up to ESA.
