For DEC they could have gone downscale to PCs, but the profit margins are too low: it's a commodity item. IBM doesn't build PCs anymore; they sold their PC business to Lenovo. Or they could have gone upscale, to compete with IBM mainframes.
Unfortunately they tried both at once with the 72" tall VAX9000 (standard VAXen were 60") and the various Crapavetti and DECMate PCs, both were hailed as the future of computing. Oh and the started promoting Unix/RISC platforms as well. Oh and then the Alpha arrived and sort of made it a bit trickier to describe the product lineup. Confused does not even begin to describe the state of the customers or the sales teams.
The meta-Turing test counts a thing as intelligent if it seeks to devise and apply Turing tests to objects of its own creation. -- Lew Mammel, Jr.
