DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC

fourteenObvious Lessons and Subtle Lessons

The analysis of the DEC story teaches us two things about how the world works. First, the lessons of history can be viewed on various levels—there are obvious lessons to be learned that are fairly clear based on events, but, more important, there are subtle lessons to be learned by trying to explain why the obvious events occurred. Second, the events of history are highly interactive. The search for root causes is flawed because it implies that there is a root cause, when, in fact, the events may have occurred for a multiplicity of reasons. For example, it is obvious that one of the reasons DEC failed is that it did not respond to the shifting market away from minicomputers to personal computers. But ...