Editing Digital Equipment Corporation (section)

=== Late 1980s diversification ===
The PDP-11 and VAX lines continued to sell in record numbers. Better yet, DEC was competing very well against the market leader, IBM, taking an estimated $2&nbsp;billion away from them in the mid-1980s. In 1986, DEC's profits rose 38% when the rest of the computer industry experienced a downturn, and by 1987 the company was threatening IBM's number one position in the computer industry.<ref name="companyhistory">[[iarchive:internationaldir0006unse/mode/1up|"Digital Equipment Corporation"]], ''International Directory of Company Histories'', Volume 6, St. James Press, 1992</ref> Not long thereafter came IBM's "VAX killer" offerings,<ref>{{cite web  |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1987/03/24/business/company-news-ibm-to-ship-computers-early.html |title=I.B.M. to Ship Computers Early |date=March 24, 1987 |publisher=NY Times |access-date=September 21, 2023}}</ref> at a time when DEC had twice the sales of IBM in the mid-range computer market.

At its peak, DEC was the second-largest computer company in the world, with over 100,000 employees. It was during this time that the company branched out development into a wide variety of projects that were far from its core business in computer equipment. The company invested heavily in custom software. In the 1970s and earlier, most software was custom-written to serve a specific task, but by the 1980s the introduction of [[relational database]]s and similar systems allowed powerful software to be built in a modular fashion, potentially saving enormous amounts of development time. Software companies like [[Oracle Corporation|Oracle]] became the new darlings of the industry, and DEC started their own efforts in every "hot" niche, in some cases several projects for the same niche. Some of these products competed with DEC's own partners, notably [[Oracle Rdb|Rdb]] which competed with Oracle's products on the VAX, part of a major partnership only a few years earlier.

Although many of these products were well designed, most of them were DEC-only or DEC-centric, and customers frequently ignored them and used third-party products instead. This problem was further exacerbated by Olsen's aversion to traditional advertising and his belief that well-engineered products would sell themselves. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on these projects, at the same time that workstations using [[RISC]] microprocessors were starting to approach VAX CPUs in performance.