Stung by the walkover DEC has been scoring over its midrange products, IBM is breaking the habits of a lifetime and entering the MIPS war with a vengeance, Associated Press reports from New York. The company’s line has long been that it wouldn’t comment on comeptitors’ machines, but this is the Year of the Customer, and the year when IBM has to convince a sceptical market that the new 9370s offer everything DEC offers with the VAX line plus a lot more. Accordingly the company is circulating among customers in the US a glossy brochure that spells out the performance of the 9370s, comparing it against machines from DEC, Data General, Prime Computer and Gould Computer Systems. Trigger for the MIPS war was DEC itself, which told analysts in January that because of IBM’s clumsy operating systems, DEC’s net usable MIPS were about 42% greater than IBM’s. IBM’s brochure, which first came out in February, contains charts indicating that IBM’s MIPS were worth two-and-a-half times DEC’s MIPS. The company is also breaking its own rules about not pre-announcing products – witness our piece yesterday on Silverlake System 38 successor, most of the information for which was gleaned from various briefings IBM itself has given around the US and Europe. Bob Djurdjevic, president of consulting outfit Annex Research Inc of Phoenix, Arizona, and an eight-year vet of IBM, which he left in 1978, is emphatic about the change: Under the banner of making itself more sensitive to customer needs, IBM at the highest levels, like Akers and Lucente, are doing things that in my days people would have been fired for, Djurdjevic told AP.