DEC engineering was awesome, but management had issues keeping up with their chip geniuses.
There's a brilliant scene in DEC history where the chip guys had to explain to the board that their latest ceramic thing with legs cost $30 in quantity, and it outperformed the top-line million-dollar ECL-based room-filling VAX product.
But DEC were always B2B and B2A (Business to Academia). They never got B2C at all, which is sad for everyone.
