Comment by vaxman

DEC failed because Corporate America perceived that the Chief Architect of VMS had created a futuristic version for Microsoft that ran on commodity hardware.

He should have convinced Ken Olsen to let him port VMS to commodity hardware and gone back to DECWRL to try again later if Ken refused, but instead he built it for Billy and Balmy who were guaranteed to (and, in fact, did) use it to destroy the lives of every DEC employee and every industry worker that had specialized in DEC's proprietary (but incredible) systems, also setting back the progress of mankind a couple of decades because NT turned out really terrible compared to VMS, giving rise to Linus' science project born out of the pages of a book on operating system theory written by an academic with no real world experience compared to the Chief Architect of VMS, RSX11, RT11, etc. (If there is no Hell, he's home free. If we make hell on Earth, then for him, it must be knowing that WSL exists.)