wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) (12/05/90)
After having talked to Rod Young from Australia at FORML, I am not surprised that Harris has dropped the RTX line. Rod described to me the great difficulty that he had in getting any information about the RTX from either the Australian Harris distributor or from Harris in Florida. I realized that Harris does not know how to sell microprocessors. This is not an indictment of Harris; it simply isn't their business. Their sales force primarily has training and experience in selling analog ICs, and you can't just dump a new class of product in their laps and expect them to run with it. It takes time and LOTS of money to develop an effective worldwide sales team. Salesmen spend years developing contacts within engineering teams, and the intersection between the people using the analog line and the RTX line is probably small. A lot of companies have gone out of business by straying too far from the center of their expertise. You can't expect an aluminum siding salesman to switch to selling computers and to be effective immediately. You can't expect a PC salesman to immediately be a good mainframe salesman. The merchant microprocessor industry is BIG business, and it takes big bucks and commitment to "ante up" and get in the game. "$15 and no support" may sound like a good idea, but as a business plan for a multinational company, it doesn't begin to work. Mitch
koopman@a.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Philip Koopman) (12/06/90)
In article <9012051459.AA18722@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>, wmb@MITCH.ENG.SUN.COM (Mitch Bradley) writes: > I realized that Harris does not know how to sell microprocessors. This > is not an indictment of Harris; it simply isn't their business. ... I would split a hair here. Harris has *lots* of experience second-sourcing extremely popular microprocessors (80C286) or microprocessors sold to captive markets. The difference with RTX was that they couldn't simply duplicate the prime manufacturer's spec sheets, app. notes, software... Harris does silicon; it doesn't appear to do software and marketing all that well for microprocessors. The higher-ups at Harris took too long to realize the full extent of what it takes to support a proprietary instruction set processor. > The merchant microprocessor industry is BIG business, and it takes big > bucks and commitment to "ante up" and get in the game. > "$15 and no support" may sound like a good idea, but as a business plan > for a multinational company, it doesn't begin to work. You said it. It doesn't make sense for Harris to play in the RTX arena unless there are prospects for several customers in the 10,000 to 100,000 piece per year range. Who out there *realistically* can plan to be there within 2 years? (If so, contact me and I can put you in touch with the people who are trying to keep stack-based processors in the marketplace). Too often I have heard from the Forth community that they want it for $5, and they will need 100, maybe 500 over the next year or two... Phil Koopman koopman@greyhound.ece.cmu.edu Arpanet 2525A Wexford Run Rd. Wexford, PA 15090 *** this space for rent ***