I've always wondered what the computing landscape would be like if DEC hadn't been so desperately afraid of undercutting their mini/mainframe business, and unwilling to serve the small business and/or home markets.
All of their early micros were hobbled in some way to make them not-quite-compatible; the Rainbow, despite running MS-DOS, was not IBM PC compatible, and the Professional series had incompatibilities with standard PDP-11 systems. The Rainbow didn't even include a FORMAT command for formatting floppy disks; you were expected to buy preformatted ones from DEC, and using standard 5.25" floppies with hub rings was a good way to kill your floppy drive due to the RX50's mechanical design.
Probably the best shot at a home PDP-11 came via Heathkit with the H11 and H11A machines, but that was a small niche.
Even when they finally admitted to themselves that micros were the way of the future, they concentrated on the enterprise market, to the exclusion of all else. Back when the Alpha was the performance king, I would have loved to be able to have one, but the cost was well out of reach of mere mortals.
In my experience, the main reason these companies fail and especially why acquisitions don’t turn out well is the assumption that the way you do business and the people you have are just successful in their own right and will just take in the new sheep and keep fleecing the larger flock. It doesn’t work like that.
>All of their early micros were hobbled in some way to make them not-quite-compatible
All the minicomputer makers suffered from this to greater or lesser degrees. I think their micros were so compatible with the IBM PC relative to the completely vertical silos that their minis lived in--own chips, own systems, own disks, own apps, etc.--that they just couldn't see that mostly-compatible == incompatible. Furthermore, as another comment noted, they were reluctant to even sell in computer stores much less something radical like mail order.
All of their early micros were hobbled in some way to make them not-quite-compatible; the Rainbow, despite running MS-DOS, was not IBM PC compatible, and the Professional series had incompatibilities with standard PDP-11 systems. The Rainbow didn't even include a FORMAT command for formatting floppy disks; you were expected to buy preformatted ones from DEC, and using standard 5.25" floppies with hub rings was a good way to kill your floppy drive due to the RX50's mechanical design.
Probably the best shot at a home PDP-11 came via Heathkit with the H11 and H11A machines, but that was a small niche.
Even when they finally admitted to themselves that micros were the way of the future, they concentrated on the enterprise market, to the exclusion of all else. Back when the Alpha was the performance king, I would have loved to be able to have one, but the cost was well out of reach of mere mortals.