At first blush, such a strategy – which is said to include an answer to IBM’s Systems Applications Architecture under the name Desktop Software Architecture – look like a super-high-risk bet-your-company decision, but there are several factors that militate against that view: the first is that many of IBM’s woes are the result of having clung on for far to long to a hopelessly antiquated and inflexible architecture, 370; the second is that DEC has done incomparably better since it wrote of its history and replaced the PDP-11 with the VAX as its core product; the third is that mastery of RISC technology has made efficient emulation of different environments much easier.
