The Real Story About HP's Announcement...

WHO DID IT?
=========
The decision to discontinue the HP e3000 was made - to the best of my
knowledge - (and I'm probably in a better position to know than 99% of
the people on this list) - by one person - Winston Prather, the general
manager of the HP e3000 business. Winston was not told to discontinue
the HP e3000 business by Carly Fiorina, or by anybody else. Nor was he
forced to make the decision because of any proposed merger between HP
and any other company. Winston made the decision because of one simple,
easy to understand business reason, which I would like to try to explain
in this posting.

WHY?
====
One of the tasks that I've been assigned during the last three weeks has
been to respond to the MPE-related email messages that have arrived at
HP since November 14th. Many of these were addressed to Carly Fiorina
(her address was posted on this list), and many more came from the e3000
website at www.hp.com/go/e3000. The folks who sent these messages
described themselves as being among the tens of thousands of loyal HP
e3000 customers who took issue with HP's decision. My unenviable task
was to respond to them -- all of them. Now, you may be wondering how
one guy can respond to all of those messages? After all, HP must have
received thousands of complaints from loyal hp e3000 customers. It
would take weeks to reply to them all - right?

Well actually, we received fewer than 50 emails. About 10 of them had
nothing to do with the HP e3000. At least one was a spam message
containing a get-rich-quick scheme. Of the remainder, most came from
people who subscribe to this list and post here regularly. There
weren't "thousands of emails" because there aren't "tens of thousands"
of loyal HP e3000 customers, at least not any longer. The vast majority
of HP e3000 customers have either moved off of the platform, or were in
the process of doing so before November 14th. To most HP e3000
customers, the announcement was not a surprise. When all else is said
and done, HP discontinued the HP e3000 because it has ceased to be
strategic - not to HP - but to its customers. Customers have been
moving away from the HP e3000 and towards other platforms for a long
time. They have been dropping their support contracts. They have been
deciding not to buy new models of the HP e3000. This is pretty much
what HP said in the announcement materials (I know because I helped
write them). And it's true.

Occaisonally, people have speculated on this list about how many MPE/iX
customers there are. There's even a website that purports to list
them. The number that comes up most frequently is 70,000. I can
confirm that at one time, HP knew of that many. But during the past 10
years, customers have been gradually moving away from MPE/iX toward
HP-UX, Linux, Windows/NT and (more recently) Windows/2000. This should
not come as a surprise to anybody who reads this list regularly. How
many posts have their been on this list announcing that "our company is
shutting down its last HP e3000." So how many HP e3000 customers are
left today? Here's a quote from a recent ComputerWorld article that
contains a pretty broad hint:

The 3000 series was launched in 1972 and is one of the last of the
old-line minicomputers left standing, along with Compaq Computer
Corp.'s OpenVMS-based systems and IBM's AS/400, which is now
called the iSeries . Winston Prather, general manager of the HP
e3000 business unit, said "several thousand of the systems are
still in use” an amount that some analysts termed a big
understatement.

Whether or not Winston's quote is an understatement depends on how you
define the word "customer". Several of the emails that I received via
Carly's mailbox came from software vendors that sell applications or
tools for the HP e3000. A few referred quite proudly to the fact that
they have customers who run old SPL versions of their products on HP3000
series 70s. These are machines that HP hasn't sold or supported in
nearly 15 years. Are these people "customers?" I'm no business major,
but in my book, a "customer" is a person who buys something from you.
If these people are buying support from thse software vendors, then they
are certainly customers OF THAT SOFTWARE VENDOR. But regardless of
their protestations of loyalty, you can't really call them HP customers
any longer. You'd have to include all the people that are using
obsolete, unsupported or 2nd-hand hardware purchased from and supported
by brokers to call Winston's quote an "understatement."

I'm proud to be associated with a platform with the longevity and upward
compatibility of the HP e3000. I'm proud to be associated with a
business that has allowed these people to be able to run their
businesses in such a cost effective manner for so many years. But I
must point out that customers such as these are part of the reason why
HP has been forced into making this decision. There's nothing wrong
with what they've done. They've made business decisions. That's what
you do when you're in business. But when people boast in one breath
about how loyal they've been to HP, but in the next breath go on to say
that they are using an HP e3000 model that hasn't been sold or supported
in five, ten or even fifteen years (one email that I received even
boasted about the great price he got from a broker!) then the problem
begins to become clear.

WHO'S TO BLAME?
============
A lot of the rhetoric that has appeared on this list in the last three
weeks has sought to fix blame on HP for "killing" the HP e3000. It's
easy, in hindsight, to look back on the last 30 years, (and a number of
the emails that I've responded to have tried to do exactly that) and
second guess the decisions that HP made.

* Did HP put enough energy and resources into marketing
the HP e3000?

* Should HP have positioned the HP e3000 differently against
the HP 9000?

* Should we have spent more money on advertising?

* Should we have spent our advertising dollars in publications
like the Wall Street Journal?

If all you're concerned about is the HP e3000, then these are all
"no-brainers". The answers are clearly "yes", "yes", "yes" and "yes."
But HP isn't (and should not be) concerned with ONLY one product, even
when that product is the HP e3000. It's important to recognize that
every decision is a trade-off. It's easy for the armchair-quarterbacks
among us (and I'm as guilty of this as anybody) to point out things that
HP "coulda, shoulda" done on behalf of the HP e3000. But it's not
always so easy to see what impact those decisions might have had on HP's
other product lines, or on HP as a whole.

* If HP had put more energy into resources into marketing
the HP e3000, would we have ended up like DEC - who put
their resources behind the VAX and wound up being sold to
Compaq?

* If we had positioned MPE/iX as being "more reliable than
HP-UX" might we have lost tens of thousands of HP 9000
sales to UNIX competitors who pointed out that "even
HP admits that HP-UX is unreliable - they say that their
old proprietary system is more reliable than their new UNIX
box."

* If we had spent our advertising dollars on The Wall Street
Journal, or the New York Times, or even ComputerWorld,
should have have paid for it by pulling all our ads from
HP pubs like Interact, HPworld & the Newswire?

SO NOW WHAT?
===========
I've seen HP make a lot of decisions that have related to the HP e3000
during the 18 years or so that I've worked for this company. I've
agreed with some, and disagreed with others. When I've disagreed, I've
often found it's been because the company was operating under
constraints that I didn't understand. More often than not, I've come
around as I've learned more.

Personally, I wish HP hadn't made the decision to discontinue the HP
e3000. Like many of you, my career is linked to the HP e3000, and so at
some level anything that's bad for MPE/iX is bad for me and my family.
But I understand that in very real terms, HP's hands were tied. Given
the situation that we're facing *now* at the end of the year 2001, I
don't think the company had much choice.

Second guessing the company's decision isn't going to change anything.
The important thing is to move on with the business at hand - which is
to help the customers who are still using the HP e3000. There are a
variety of ways to approach this problem. A number of HP partner
organizations have developed (or are developing) tools for migrating
programs from the HP e3000 to other platforms. Beginning in January,
I'm going to be hosting a series of webcasts on behalf of HP during
which we'll discuss all the details of the transition in detail. More
details to come. So stay tuned....

<--- big snip --->

George is an excellent wordsmith, so I will not presume to compete. Let me
just note that from all the postings, memos, press releases, etc. from HP,
one thing stands out clearly. MPE, IMAGE and the HP 3000 were doomed for the
very reason they were celebrated: they were extremely reliable and
efficient. Customers did not need to upgrade every year or even every other
year. My production machine is a six year-old 959/400. Even though we
doubled the number of users during that time to a peak of 750 sessions with
20 concurrent batch jobs, the only upgrade we had to make was doubling
memory to two GB to maintain second and sub-second response time. Sad, isn't
it, that HP could not find a sufficiently profitable business model for such
a reliable and efficient system.

I could go on for pages enumerating the mistakes I think HP made, but you
all already know what they are.

[BTW, not everyone who wrote Ms Fiorino received a canned e-mail from George
- I got a telephone call from someone who had no idea what he or I was
talking about.]

John Burke

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* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *

George does us all a service when he wrote what he wrote. It was written with
all of the passion of someone who believes that CSY has done what they have
done for all the right reasons, primarily the protection of the current user
base.

I've listened now four times to George's webcast where he announces the end
of the HP3000, and it's clear from George's voice that that webcast was the
least pleasant thing he had to do that day, and because of George's long and
faithful history with the HP3000, I tend to trust George a great deal, as I
do essentially everyone at CSY. I don't for a minute believe that anyone is
purposefully deceiving us.

Nonetheless, it's important for the people in CSY to understand the reason
that a great many users still feel betrayed. Roy Breslawski wrote quite the
opposite of George's comments just two years ago, but with an equal passion
about the user base not understanding CSY's intentions, in article entitled,
"The HP 3000 -- Here Today and. . . Here Tomorrow". I've quoted just a bit of
it below:

======================================

From my perspective, absolutely, there's a huge difference in the way
customers perceive MPE today and the state of the business and their future.
I was in this job only three weeks before HP World, but even in that time it
was easy to get a sense of what people thought. There was a lot of fear about
the future. When is the bomb really going to drop about MPE going away? And
that [dispelling this fear] was really a key objective at HP World.

Without having the history, I could tell that even within the division here
people thought, "Enough is enough." This has built up long enough. Let's just
get rid of this nonsense about the HP 3000 going away. It just takes up
everybody's energy unproductively, and I think the people who were at HP
World got that message. I think even people beyond there got that message,
but there's still a long way to go. There's a whole universe of people out
there who were not at HP World, and they're not connected through newsgroups
and so on. And it's going to take time to get everyone to that same level of
comfort.

I have to say that in the general HP 3000 user base today the general concern
still is, When is it [the HP 3000] going away? And those are the people who
just haven't gotten the message yet.

=======================================

The entire article (or at least the first part of it) is at:

http://www.interex.org/hpworldnews/hpw801/mpe/01mpe.html

Wirt Atmar

The point that HP should not just market the 3000. I don't think that
anyone has said that HP should only market the 3000. It seems like they
did everything not to market the platform at all. Whenever the HP product
line was presented, where was MPE?? UNIX, Windows/NT, Linux, but no MPE.
Sure there were ads in the HP related magazines. But what about the open
press? In the industry rags that I have seen, there has never been an ad
for the 3000. How do you expect to gain customers if you're only marketing
to your existing customers? That's like saying McDonalds should only offer
their commercials and marketing materials inside their restaurants and no
where else.

I don't get it. Was HP not up to the challenge? Or may be they felt that
there is no competition for the 3000. Ever hear of the AS400, or
considering the power of the 3000, a main frame??

Later and Get EXTREME
OpenMPE!!!

Or perhaps you would have ended up like IBM with a solid mid-range
platform, like the AS/400, in your stable of products to be sold.

This implies the only way to marked the HP e3000 is to attack the HP9000?!?
You can't market them side by side, most likely in separate ads, as be two
good choices that are different? In my toolbox I have both a "flat head"
and a "Phillips" screwdriver. True I could force the use the "flat head"
much of the time on "Phillips" head screws, but it's not the best tool for
the job and isn't going to do as good a job. Likewise, there is no single
computer that is the best for every job, including the HP e3000 (and the
HP9000).

Again, you assume an all or nothing approach?!? Why couldn't you spread
your advertising dollars across multiple types of publications. If you're
not sure how to do that, then ask the folks over in the 9000 division. They
don't seem to have trouble advertising at HPWorld, Interact, and other
non-HP specific publications, like the ones mentioned.

Thanx,
Jon

I thought any rhetoric from a small fry such as myself
would have made no difference.

Tracy Johnson
MSI Schaevitz Sensors

It's not to late :)

Thanx,
Jon

That was something you didn't have
to do, and very few, if any, in your
position would have bothered.

Regards,

David Burney
GFS IT Support
Asia Pacific

Singapore (Current Location)
Telnet : 215-8070
Mobile : +65 98331769
Pager : 98054936

Japan
Telnet : 365-3144 (Agilent)
Telnet : 368-5891 (HP)
Mobile : +81 9051500089

<big snip>

In other words, the 3000 is dead, and it's going to stay that way, so get
over it.

Looks like the OpenMPE project is dead even before it had a chance to live.

Jim Phillips Information Systems Manager
Email: jim_ph...@thermolink.com Therm-O-Link, Inc.
Phone: 330-527-2124 P. O. Box 285
Fax: 330-527-2123 10513 Freedom Street
Web: http://www.tolwire.com Garrettsville, OH 44231

I WANT MY MPE!

I didn't hear that OpenMPE is dead or alive. In fact, I distinctly heard
*nothing* on the subject, at least not from George ;)

Thanx,
Jon

Jim Phillips responds:

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> It's not to late :)

BULL!

By the time Palmer handed DEC to Compaq the VAX was already at EOL. Years
before that sale DEC had stopped marketing the VAX. DEC was still marketing
the Alpha, but only as an UNIX and/or NT play thing.

Had DEC continued to market VMS... had HP continued to market MPE... ???

--
A study has shown that sheep can remember faces for up to 2 years, I guess
that means I'm dumber than the average sheep.

* If we had positioned MPE/iX as being "more reliable than

* If we had spent our advertising dollars on The Wall Street

This seems to address the marketing (or lack thereof) of the hp3k...George,
let me give it a humble shot, and let's just say it's in the WSJ:

"Is hardware uptime a concern for your company? Is the integrity of your
Data base paramount? Then call us for info on the hp3000 IT solution...the
world's most reliable hardware/OS/DB configuration for over 30 years"

This ad copy is beyond humble, and I've no doubt that your excellent
marketing folks could exact due justice to the hp3k platform...if they were
told to do so...isn't that really the point here?

George, in closing, I would like to pose a question that may help me in my
understanding of whether to use hp products in the future for my enterprise
IT solutions: "Did hp made a mistake regarding the hp3k, and what did you
learn from it"?

Ray S.

Gary Lustig
Director of Ticketing and Info. Systems
Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra
www.fwsymphony.org
V:817.665.6500
F:817.665.6600

>>> george c stachnik <stac...@CUP.HP.COM> 12/03/01 09:46PM >>>

Yes, it (OpenMPE) is conspicuous by its absence. However, the gist of
george's message (and the party line from HP since the Announcement) is that
the 3000 is dead, dead, dead.

Given HP's apparent reluctance to deal with OpenMPE, and the very real
timeline (deadline?) that HP has announced, coupled with the fact that I'm
going to have to present some alternatives soon in order to get funding for
what ever we decide to use in place of the 3000, if OpenMPE is not a viable
option soon (like in the next 30 - 90 days) then OpenMPE will not be an
option for us, since once we commit time and energy to starting conversion
(which we must do in the next 6 months, a year at the latest), it will be a
very hard sell to turn the tide.

I suppose I should explain "OpenMPE is not a viable option soon". I don't
mean that OpenMPE has to be ready to roll by then, but there must be more
signs of life than is shown today. A commitment from HP to release the
source would be nice. An entity in place to receive that source would be a
prerequisite.

I certainly hope that there is (lots) more going on behind the scenes than I
am privy to. That is my hope for OpenMPE.

I WANT MY MPE!

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Ron Horner
HP3000 Systems Administrator
JCPenney Logistics
rrho...@jcpenney.com
(414) 259-2274
AIM: hornerrr

> It's none of my business, but I am curious about this.
> So, why has Thermolink determined that they need to be off the 3000 in a
> year, tops?

That is not what I meant. What I meant is this:

Because it will take us almost the entire 5 years to migrate to another
platform (hey, what can I say? Things move slowly around here.), we will
need to have a formal plan in 6 months to a year. If that plan can include
OpenMPE, then that will make things easier for us. If it does not, then we
will need monetary commitments and resources and .... all of which take time
to get around here.

Having gotten used to the 3000, we are not the type of company that is going
to plunk down US$1 million or so to a project to migrate us to another
platform without a viable plan in place. As I stated in my post about
Contingency Planning, we still haven't decided whether we will move off of
the 3000 at all. Our plan may be to buy up a bunch of 3000 servers
(cheaply, of course) and store them until needed. This may be a viable
option, so long as HP licensing doesn't get in the way.

Anyway, the main thrust of my previous post was that I am more convinced
than ever (based on what I can see) that HP has killed the 3000 (and MPE)
and wants to see them stay that way. That is why my only hope is on what
(if anything) is going on behind the scenes relative to OpenMPE....

I WANT MY MPE!

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It isn't good for HP's bottom line to make machines that last forever. So very sad. This mentality encourages mediocrity.

Art Frank
Manager of Information Systems
OHSU Foundation
fra...@ohsu.edu
(503) 220-8320

>>> John Burke <John....@PACCOAST.COM> 12/03/01 08:59PM >>>
<snip>

</snip>

What do we do, send emails supporting Open MPE to hp so that can get the ball rolling, huh? Sounds like from George Stachnik there isn't the groundswell of support for this approach we all (at least on this list) expected?

Regards

John M Penney
Systems Programmer / Administration
Production Services
Information Services Department
Pierce County
Tacoma, WA
253-798-6215
jpe...@co.pierce.wa.us

>>> Jim Phillips <jim_ph...@THERMOLINK.COM> 12/04/01 06:46AM >>>

Jim Phillips Information Systems Manager

I WANT MY MPE!

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You almost certainly have some in your house right now. If you run
incandescent bulbs at a lower voltage than it's designed for, and if you
leave it on all the time or use a soft-start circuit, most will last
indefinitely. You just have to be willing to accept the reduced
efficiency and lower light output. This is a pretty standard trick, in
fact. I think I've seen step-down transformers in industrial catalogs
that are designed for this application -- to run lighting strings in
places where lamp replacement is expensive or hazardous.

But the longevity-for-efficiency trade-off is a nice metaphor. You don't
get something for nothing, even with the HPe3000.

-- Bruce

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Toback Tel: (602) 996-8601| My candle burns at both ends;
OPT, Inc. (800) 858-4507| It will not last the night;
11801 N. Tatum Blvd. Ste. 142 | But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
Phoenix AZ 85028 | It gives a lovely light.
btoback AT optc.com | -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Mail sent to adin...@optc.com will be inspected for a
fee of US$250. Mailing to said address constitutes agreement to
pay, including collection costs.

Home page: http://www.centennialbulb.org

Facts page: http://www.centennialbulb.org/facts.htm

It isn't good for HP's bottom line to make machines that last forever. So

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How many step-down transformers did it take for the MPE A-class boxes?

Jeff

>... I

HP had a great chance to reverse this trend in the A- and N-class boxes,
especially the low-end A-class. By hitching MPE completely to
higher-volume hardware, CSY in theory cut MPE's development cost
substantially.

But instead of taking advantage of this, someone chose to give the
A-class a pricing structure that was perfect for the computing
environment of the 1980s. I was one of those who would happily have
bought an A-class, but found the price/performance too far above what I
could get on the used market -- for year-old hardware! In fact, the
A-class provided less than *half* the industry average increase in
performance per unit price.

Why doesn't this bother IBM, which quite happily offers IBM-only and
IBM-Unix operating systems side-by-side?

This is disingenuous. If you add up all that HP spent per month in
Interact, HPWorld and the Newswire, it's less than ONE full-page WSJ ad.
And maybe the answer is "yes" regardless: if you spend all your time
preaching to the choir, you're unlikely to win any converts.

What's done is done, and it probably would have had to happen sometime.
In fact, I wouldn't have even bothered to write this were it not for the
fact that George is taking 49-emails-plus-a-spam as indicative of the
depth of dissatisfaction with the decision. Alright, now it's 50 plus a
spam.

-- Bruce

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So why didn't more people write to HP to protest the decision? Well, the
word "futility" comes to mind...

http://www.centennialbulb.org/photos.htm

Guy

The 3000 community -- suppliers beyond HP's vision, products outside its
imagination, customers who have not taken action on its offers -- is
certainly not dead. So Jim Phillips and others hoping for good things from
OpenMPE might take some comfort in these words from Winston Prather, head of
the HP 3000 division, in our upcoming (January 2002) Q&A:

NewsWire: Can a 3000 community survive and thrive beyond HP?

Prather: Absolutely. It's all a matter of what you mean by survive and
thrive. Will there be people who use the HP 3000 beyond 2006? Absolutely.
Look back at MPE V and other proprietary platforms. There will be some
community that exists, no question about it. It's just a matter of how the
3000 will be used, and what level of mission-criticality will the customers
use the platform for. I don't think there's anything HP can do to kill it.

As to George Stachnik's proposal of eliminating ads in publications like
ours, to free up budget to purchase a Wall Street Journal type of ad, Bruce
Toback is correct: the cost of a full year of ads in the NewsWire, even
center spreads, wouldn't buy one quarter-page ad in the WSJ. We've always
thought HP should be advertising the 3000 in many places, preaching in the
wilderness as well as inside church. Preaching to the choir is pretty
inexpensive, too: we've kept ad rates at the 1995 level throughout our
history, so a quarter-page costs under $300, just as it did back then.
Prices like that leave HP plenty of budget to be considering other ad
venues. :)

Go to the Web address below to sign up for your free trial subscription to
the NewsWire, to get your December and January issues. There's plenty of
3000 story to tell in the months and years to come.

--

Ron Seybold, Editor In Chief
The 3000 NewsWire
Independent Information to Maximize Your HP 3000
http://www.3000newswire.com
512.331.0075 -- rsey...@zilker.net

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One of the emails that was sent to Carly (and forwarded to me)
accused her (probably quite justifiably) of having "never logged on
to an HP e3000." The writer went on to explain in detail how his
HP e3000 (which was, as I recall, a model we haven't sold for years)
hadn't crashed in months, and pointedly asked our CEO "Don't you
know how reliable the HP e3000 is?"

I'd like to suggest that the question of what Carly knows about the
reliability of the HP e3000 is hardly the point. Actually, I think
a far more important point was made by one of the people who
responded to my original post:

John Burke wrote:

If I may, let me take off my HP badge here and speak only as a guy
from Chicago who knows a little about computers. At first blush, John's
statement is pretty astonishing. How could reliability and efficiency
"doom" a product? Unfortunately, to those of us who work in marketing,
it's
not a mystery at all. When push comes to shove, most of the buying
decisions that I've seen made in the past 10 years have been made based
on three criteria: price, price and price.

Whenever HP made any effort to sell HP e3000s (or anything else) on
overall cost of ownership, reliability or ease of use, the discussion
quickly
got bogged down down in technical details, side-discussions and finger-
pointing by competitors ("oh yeah - well our products are *just* as reliable

as your HP e3000! Prove I'm wrong!"). This would ordinarly go on until the

buyer eventually knuckled under and made a decision based on something
he could readily understand - i.e. the price.

> Sad, isn't it, that HP could not find a sufficiently profitable
> business model for such a reliable and efficient system.

With my HP badge still off, let me say that if you want a scapegoat,
blame the commoditization of the computer business. As more and
more buying decisions are made based on price, vendors inevit-
ably concentrate on price above all else. Reliability and efficiency
are not bad things - they're just not relevant. And if you ever chose
a $600 PC over a $1200 model that was better built, then you're part
of this trend.

It's not hard to see that when the computer industry began moving
in a commodity direction, a lot of pressure came to bear on products with
high quality (and high prices to match). You ask why we didn't
promote the reliability of the HP e3000? Customers wouldn't talk
to us about anything but price. In many customers' perception,
price was the only thing that was real. We could talk about reliability,
ease-of-use, and "worry-free business critical computing" 'till we were
blue in the face and all the typical customer heard was the price
tag. If you're a sales rep who's trying to put 2 kids through college,
you only need one experience like that to conclude that in the future,
all you're going to spend your time on are the products with the lowest
prices.

That's why Linux is doing so well. Some people have tried to explain
Linux's success in terms of it's technical superiority to Windows. Humbug.
Linux's success can best be understood in the context of a quote
from an IT manager who was buying his first Linux-based solution.
According to the story I heard, he said, "So let me get this straight.
I pay you $50 for this CD, and I can make as many copies of it as
I like and install it on as many machines as I want, and I don't have
to pay you another penny in licensing fees - is that right?" Now there's
a guy who's not buying "worry-free-business-critical" anything unless
the price tag is the lowest one on the block. And he's very typical
of the IT market today - if it ain't price - it ain't real - period.

In a commoditized marketplace, if you do manage to stay in the
running long enough to make the claim that your product is more
reliable than somebody else's platform, you are quickly challenged
to "prove it." And reliability is a very difficult thing to prove. There's

no "TPC-R" benchmark for reliability.

The only folks who won't ask for proof are those who already *have*
one of your products. People who already are using an HP e3000
already *know* how reliable and easy to use it is, so they don't ask
for proof. That's why the HP e3000 gradually morphed into an
"installed base business", and why HP chose to spend our advertising
dollars in installed base pub's like HPWorld, Interact and the Newswire
instead of on the Wall Street Journal or Computerworld. Smart companies
spend their money where they think they'll get some return on it.

The commoditization of the computer industry is a well-documented fact.
(See http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,17827,FF.html)
But personally, I believe that there is a limit to this trend. Eventually,
the
customers of even the most commoditized industries wake up one
morning and say to themselves, "Hey - this commodity coffee tastes
terrible" and next day, out of nowhere, a company like Starbucks
appears, creating a market for coffee that costs $3.00 a cup instead
of $0.30 a cup. The question is, is the IT industry anywhere near
commoditized enough for the pendulum to begin swinging back the
other way?

A few years back, CSY went through a period during which it made a
number of pretty aggressive statements about the future of the HP e3000.
Wirt recently posted part of an article that a former CSY marketing
manager wrote entitled "The HP 3000 -- Here Today and. . . Here
Tomorrow." I remember when that article was published, it was applauded
by HP e3000 customers who felt that Hp was finally getting behind
the HP e3000.

Wirt faulted HP for not keeping the promises that the author of that article

made. I suspect that the writer of the article believed that the IT
industry
had reached the point that I'm talking about. I think he believed that
there were customers out there who might be willing to pay premium
prices for systems that had the "stay-up-ability" of the HP e3000. Conse-
quently, he made some pretty aggressive statements on behalf of
the division about the future of the HP e3000 platform.

Unfortunately, the author of the article that Wirt posted was wrong.
Maybe it was a case of "too little too late" - or maybe people overestimate
how much influence articles, advertisements and other marketing
tools really have. I'm inclined to think the latter. But before you call
your
congressman to complain that HP doesn't keep its promises, read the article
that Wirt posted one more time. The author raises a question, rhetorically,

"When is MPE going away?" And he *never* answers the question. The
article makes no promises. He states an intent ("Let's just get rid of this

nonsense about the HP 3000 going away.") But he never promises that
the HP e3000 would be around forever, or even for another five years. HP
never promised that the HP e3000 would be around forever. And if you
thought HP did promise any such thing, then be careful that you're not just
hearing what you want to hear.

All that having been said, is MPE/iX dead? Certainly not yet. HP has
stated
that there will be another release of MPE/iX (probably called 7.5) next
year.
This will be in support of the PA-8700 chip; this represents a last
performance
"kicker" for the HP e3000 family. But what about after 2006?

I've been criticized in this forum for not saying anything about the
"OpenMPE"
discussions that have been going on in this newsgroup. I'll say this much.
If I haven't said anything, it's because so far, there's nothing to
say. Although there are a number of people inside of HP who are
investigating
potential MPE futures, no decisions have been made. Let me be quite clear
on that point. HP hasn't agreed to anything, nor has the company ruled
anything
out. If you support an OpenMPE initiative, you need to make a business
proposition
to HP and show that will have real value to customers going forward.

And that, as Forrest Gump said, is just about all I have to say about that.
At least for now...

Personally, I have been known to offer sales reps, such as when I'm buying a
suit, or restaurant servers more money then the publish price. If they have
another customer who appears in a hurry, I tell them to go ahead and take
care of that customer. It's interesting to see their reactions. All of a
sudden things start flying out from the back room or secret reserve wine
list. They tell me things that I know no other customer would want to know
<lol>. The bull shit factor goes to zero.

A cocktail waitress on her last day at my favorite French Bistro came over
to me 12 years ago and said, "Steve Wong, you arethe toughest customer I
ever had. You probably thought you were just being nice. I know your type.
You know what your buying and if I don't give you the quality you demand,
you'll cut me off." You know what, she's was right. I'm the type that
quietly walks away. Also, I believe, its only expensive if it doesn't work.

Sorry about dumping. It's something that's always has bothered me when your
trying to help the customer be successful, which is all that we care about
at HP.

Steve

The "alleged" is appropriate, because in his last three years at DEC,
Palmer was trimming off parts of DEC that Compaq didn't want. This
caused some to wonder whose stockholder Palmer was working for: DEC's
or Compaq's.

Even now, VMS is worth $3 billion a year, per:

http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010808S0007
InformationWeek > OpenVMS > OpenVMS Is Flying High > August 8, 2001

[snip]

'Rich Marcello, general manager and VP of Compaq's high-performance
systems division, says there are 450,000 OpenVMS systems running
worldwide-it's a $3 billion business for Compaq, and OpenVMS will be
ported to Intel's Itanium processor in 2003. Besides military and
government, Marcello says OpenVMS is doing well in some financial,
hospital, and telecommunications markets. "We have many commitment
letters out to support OpenVMS through 2011," says Marcello, "and we
even have some government pacts past 2015." '

And that is high-margin business, unlike the Wintel Cartel boxes, which
have paper-thin margins.

Yet it seems to be absent from HP's vision.

--Jerry Leslie (my opinions are strictly my own)

I agree. This is basic. However, Linux would not be adopted if
it didn't provide a pretty robust and reliable environment most
of the time. Commoditized computing does need to be "good enough"
and Linux is "good enough".

However, let's look at Oracle. Here is a computer software tool
vendor successfully charging a lot of money per user or per Mhz.

What was really missing was the ability to compare a Unix/Oracle
solution price against Mpe/Image solution price for the same
transaction rate. HP/CSY would have had to approach the MPE
business as a vendor of a database specially tuned to PA-RISC
hardware, not as a hardware vendor of a general business computer.
Each MPE sale would buy a HP PA-RISC machine which would be priced
the same as for HPUX. MPE/Image would be charged for at rates
competitive to Oracle. That way MPE/Image and HPUX wouldn't
compete directly. Even then, Oracle runs on multiple platforms
and MPE/Image doesn't. Most application vendors are supporting
Oracle, not MPE/Image, which really leads back to HP/CSY keeping
MPE/Image competitive with development tools and capabilities
(e.g. RDBMS), etc.

Richard
--
Richard L Gambrell, Senior Information Technology Consultant and
Director of Computing Systems and Networks
Information Technology Division, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Fax: 423-755-4150 Support Help-Desk: 423-755-4000
Direct phone: 423-755-5316 ITD Business Office: 423-757-1755
Mobile (urgent): 423-432-5122 Main UTC: 423-755-4111
Email: richard-...@utc.edu

John Clogg replied:

I agree with John. When the decision was formally announced, I felt like
writing a nasty e-mail to Carly. For better or worse, the message went
to the trash can--why bother when HP has made their decision and officially
announced the demise of the 3000. I have avoided posting anything in this
list, until now, due to my anger, frustration and disappointment in HP
killing the 3000.

My employer bought a new N-4000 in August, in part, on the strength of the
five year plan and the expectation of moving MPE to the IA-64
platform. Think betrayed.

So George, if you're reading this, make the count 51 plus one spam.

------------------------------------------------------------------
John Pearce <jpe...@rmi.net> | Bethesda Management Company
Speaking for only myself | Colorado Springs, CO USA

>> snip >>

Right. The decision has been made, nothing to be gained by objecting.

My client also bought an N-class in August, to replace an old 960.
In light of Nov. 14th, it probably should have been a 9x9 box, to be
consistent with the existing 969. End-of-support date is the same.

HP-UX? There's one application that has been running on HP-UX for
at least ten years, long enough to convince everyone that that is NOT
the way to go.

Cecile Chi

Even with as weak a replacement as NT (Windows 2000, Windows XP) Server, how
do you convince HP that the goodwill produced by OpenMPE is more profitable
than selling some number of new NT (or HPUX, assuming it's got a future :-< )
servers to each HP3000 customer who decides not to jump ship?

--
`-_-' In hoc signo hack, Peter da Silva.
'U` "A well-rounded geek should be able to geek about anything."
-- nic...@esperi.org
Disclaimer: WWFD?

My response to this and with all due respect and I'm honestly not being
argumentative when I ask this...how do you explain the success of the
AS400? Or is it, too, on the brink of failure due to commoditization?

John Lee
Vaske Computer Solutions

My understanding is their sales are declining each year too. The
AS400 has a much larger installed base and many more ISVs than the
3000 ever had, so IBM can sustain the platform much longer. IBM
also has been more aggressive with the AS400, from what I've seen,
so I expect it to last quite a few more years -- but eventually it
too will be obsoleted.

FWIW,
Jeff Vance, CSY

Hp was content to let the software purveyors (AMISYS, MACS to name a couple)
sell the 3k box to new clients, and have the old installed base come back
for upgrades at will.

Last, and by no means least, if the cost of a box was the driving factor in
a companies decision of why not to by a 3k (as George S. states), then it's
true, the 3k is toast, but in reality, companies buy business solutions
overall, of which the software portion of the solution is usually the most
expensive, and the box it runs on is only an ancillary consideration. In
short, when hp stopped selling "SOLUTIONS" for business that included a 3k
box and the IMAGE DB, they walked away from the 3k then and there.

Ray S.

> Subject: Re: The Real Story About HP's Announcement...

> They could find one, they just chose not to implement it.
>
> The HP3000 pricing structure has not moved significantly from
> where it was in the 1980s when the noxious weed that we now
> know as wintel first invaded the sunny fields of corporate
> infoculture. This is not surprising, HP is a large company that
> arose in a period of revolutionary technological development.
> It is customary for revolutionaries to be overtaken by events as
> the rest of the world catches up and then passes them by.
> The revolutionary economic nature of the PC was too
> fundamental for a mature company to grasp.
>
> HP charged exorbitant prices for compilers and development
> tools for the HP3000 when others aggressively gave them
> away for wintel developers. HP continued to market the
> HP3000 to 'upscale' DP organizations at high margins when
> the automated-info biz was becoming thin-margin mass-
> culture desktops, laptops, and notebooks. HP did not cater to
> nor ever developed the 'little-guy' market for the HP3000. An
> Intel based PC was the first computer nearly all small
> businesses were exposed to after 1985 or so. HP wasn't even
> on the horizon for companies buying their first computer in the
> 1980s.
>
> Well, what company having grown to the point that they need
> 'real' computing is going to throw out their existing investment
> in knowledge, unless there is a clear and dramatic reason for
> doing so? Who from HP is going to sell to these people into
> the teeth of ten-plus years of experience with a different
> computing environment? If HP wanted to be selling HP3000s
> to these people in the 1990s then they needed to be there
> when those companies were starting up, not ten years later.
> The HP3000 is only an economical choice when you can get
> past the cost of entry. This cost was set artificially high in my
> opinion, and kept there long after it was evident to many that it
> would inevitably result in the "logical business decision"
> recently made.
>
> None of the forgoing is news to HP, nor is it offered with the
> benefit of hindsight. These comments were made by myself
> and others for many years beginning in the early 1990s. Yet, I
> remember at InterX 95 in Toronto being in a management
> session where HP told the audience that they didn't want to
> deal with people who spent less than 5 million USD per
> annum on HP systems. 5 MILLION USD!!!! just to have some
> recent college grad with no experience (= HP sales-rep)
> fumble through a price-list that could have just as well
> contained refrigerators and microwaves as far as they were
> concerned? And HP now wonders why most HP3000 sites
> don't deal with them any more? Please????!!!
>
> As for people buying used HP3000s not being HP customers,
> see what GM and Ford have to say about that! Certainly if
> one views a computer as a disposable item then HP is right.
> These devices should just self-destruct after two to four years
> and then HP or someone can build and sell another. However,
> that is really not the way the world works, not in the long term.
> PCs have been evolving rapidly both in hardware and
> software, but what has fueled this development is not inbred
> obsolescence but the rapid expansion of the market into small
> business and homes.
>
> In short, there were new fields to clear and plant with
> computers and the PC had the crucial benefit of low cost of
> acquisition. This expanding market paid for the further
> development of technologies that both brought down prices
> and increased utility. So that the market kept growing, and
> growing, and growing. This went on for so long that people
> thought that it could never end.
>
> Well, it might not have ended but the rate of expansion has
> certainly slowed down and continues to shrink. The overall
> cost of continual upgrades has finally sunk into the
> subconscious of a large number of users, personal and
> corporate. Further, the number of people that do not have a
> computer at all but who can afford one is dropping to the
> vanishing point. What this means is that the market
> perception of cost/benefit is shifting again. It is becoming less
> and less attractive to upgrade since the value received is often
> marginal, the cost is prohibitive, and there are fewer and fewer
> 'new sales' to fund the upgrade development to begin with.
>
> That this has come to pass is evident from increasing
> corporate resistance to purchasing upgrades for everything
> from new desktop computers, to new versions of the Windows
> OS, to MS-Office suites. This latter decline has driven
> MicroSoft's recent attempt to move from a product to a service
> provider. (Conceptually that is.)
>
> In the meantime HP, having survived the tempest has now
> closed its eyes to the gathering calm. The HP3000 is still
> most saleable but, as HP has learned, not at the prices that
> HP wishes to charge. The questions that needed answers
> were, "What is the cost of shutting down the entire line vs.
> what would it cost to make the HP3000 cost competitive with
> wintel servers? How do we displace NT/2000 from the small
> business environment?"
>
> HP's decision has been made and so these questions will
> remain unanswered. I do not expect the HP3000 to be
> resurrected regardless if there were demonstrably compelling
> economic arguments for doing so. For despite claims to the
> contrary, most decisions made by businesses are not the
> dispassionate "look at the figures and go with the numbers"
> that press releases would have you believe. These 'facts' are
> cooked and spun and presented in a fashion that supports
> whatever decision was made, for whatever reason the decision
> was made. Decisions like the HP3000 termination are
> ultimately political. They affect peoples' lives. They are not
> made with anything approaching cold logic. And no-one in
> HP, ever, is going to admit that this might possibly have been
> a mistake.
>
> The HP3000 had a good run. Our company will continue to
> run on it for the next four or five years in any case. What
> happens then will depend upon what develops over the next
> few years. An OPEN-MPE/iX remains attractive to us but
> frankly I see us going to a Linux/Open Source solution.
>
> The bottom line is that our firm spends far too much money on
> things like for vendor software and hardware support that only
> provides a marginal benefit these days. We wrote our own
> software so it isn't like we are obtaining meaningful
> enhancements to our business functionality from these
> support contracts. It is mainly insurance against unforeseen
> developments and the premiums have moved far out of line
> with the risks being insured.
>
> Anyway, I take solace in the thoughts that most of us here will
> remain together via the Internet for a few years to come and
> that future only arrives one day at a time. Who knows, all
> sorts of improbable things have happened in the past. I doubt
> that the future is completely barren of hope.
>
> Regards,
> Jim
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --- *** e-mail is not a secure channel ***
> James B. Byrne Harte & Lyne Limited
> vox: +1 905 561 1241 9 Brockley Drive
> fax: +1 905 561 0757 Hamilton, Ontario
> mailto:byr...@harte-lyne.ca Canada L8E 3C3

This is only true when a company has the size and
sophistication to make this determination internally. This level
of management is not characteristic of the vast majority of
companies who have automated over the course of the last
decade. The price of an HP3000 together with the necessary
application software was a show-stopper for a small company
with limited capitalization. There is no way around this.

HP could either price for the masses or price for the elite.
There was and is no middle course. The problem with dealing
with the elite is that there are never very many of them and
they know it.

This is not a choice that HP made, it is just an economic fact that fixed
costs can be divided over many more units for popular systems.
Cheaper software => more units => more software choices => more units =>
cheaper software => ...

The consolidation will continue.

How many minicomputer vendors and operating systems were there 20 years ago
that are now already gone or are just holding on in steady state?

DEC VAX VMS, Wang, Prime, Tandem, Unisys, HP3000 MPE, NCR, Stratus VOS, ICL,
Bull, Sequent

Probably you can name others.

_None_ of these are thriving. The idea that if HP just let people know
about MPE, they would flock to buy it is a fantasy unrelated to real
economics of why people choose the systems they do.

The same thing is happening with Unix systems.
Irix, SCO Unixware/Xenix, Tru64, DG-UX, and other obscure ones are gone or
nonviable.

Right now, only AIX, Solaris, and (maybe) HP-UX are viable. That's it.

IBM will continue it's mainframes indefinitely and probably the AS/400, but
that's hardly guaranteed.

Otherwise it's Windows and Linux.

By the way, thank you George Stachnik for taking the time to answer
questions, and thanks to everybody at CSY for providing a two year period of
active development to enable a graceful transition, instead of cutting off
all development, as many other companies would have done.

Hasn't HP done exactly that with RTE for the 1000's?

From an Interex abstract:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
RTE_6 Z007
RTE-6 RELEASE 6.2 FROM HP
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Contribution Name...........: RTE_6
Title....................: RTE-6 Release 6.2 from HP
File Names...............:00. Rename Transfer File (Interex-supplied)
:01. RTE_6.SBMT
:02. COMMUNICATOR62.TXT
:03. SRB.TXT Software Release Bulletin
:04. DIRLIST.TXT DL of RTE_6.FST
:05. RTE_6.FST fst archive file
:06. RTE_6_EULA.TXT
Operating System(s)......:
Language(s)..............:
Keywords.................: 1. System
: 2. Documentation
External Support Req'd...:
If Re-submission, Reason.:
Contributor's Name..........: Don Pottenger
Company.......: Hewlett-Packard
Street........: 11000 Wolfe Rd
City..........: Cupertino
State.........: CA
Country.......: USA
Zip Code......: 95014
Phone Number..:
E-mail address:
Contribution Abstract.......:

This is the full RTE_6 release 6.2 from Hewlett-Packard as part of <<<<<
HP's commitment to put obsolete software into the public domain. <<<<<

Interex roundly applauds HP's decision to take this step and is
very grateful to HP.

----

Since I've not actually seen this release, I don't know what they
have actually released (binaries, or sources)

Well put George. Your postings address issues we've had with the marketing
of the 3000. However, there are many examples of a quality product market
coexisting with a commoditized one. For example, many automobiles command
a higher price for higher quality. NO ONE would confuse a Mercedes with a
Geo. It is the responsibility of the vendor to differentiate its product
from the herd.

I truly like and admire the company that Bill, Dave, and the HP Way has
built, but from my 27 years of dealing with HP3000 sales, comparing it with
sales departments of other large vendors, and putting it as delicately as I
can, your people had A LOT to learn. I lost count years ago of how many
3000 sales HP lost around here because the sales people didn't know how to
brag about your product and support the sale. That is where another
shepherd of MPE can succeed where others have failed.

Yes, HP can stall and block such an initiative, but please don't let that
happen. Your wonderful creation, the HP3000, and all those brilliant
people who made it possible deserve a chance to continue writing history.

Best Regards,

Frank Gribbin

P.S. If the 3000 were marketed as boldly .....

Microsoft Windows CE for Automotive 3.5 Advances In-Car Computing
New Software Platform Enables Safe, Customizable Telematics Products And
Services for the Automotive Industry

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/011205/sfw070_1.html

<pun> Has this been crash tested ? </pun>

Sure would prefer MPE running MY car.

Reminds me of the sign Sergei Gorshkov, one time Admiral of the
Soviet Navy had over his door. This was during the period of the
Soviet Naval buildup of the late 1960s through 1980s. While they
knew their ships were not always technologically better than most
U.S.N. ships at the time, what could not be made up in quality
would be made up in quantity. The sign read:

"Better is the enemy of good enough."

Tracy Johnson
MSI Schaevitz Sensors

Quick aside: When news that George Stachnik was coming back to CSY, it was
taken as a sure sign that great things were coming to the 3000. see
(http://raven.utc.edu/cgi-bin/WA.EXE?A2=ind0011B&L=hp3000-l&P=R19980) So
you are somewhat to blame for the heightened expectations before the
body-slam. ;-)

> WHO DID IT?
> =========
> The decision to discontinue the HP e3000 was made - to the best of my
> knowledge - (and I'm probably in a better position to know than 99% of
> the people on this list) - by one person - Winston Prather,

I believe you but by now you have the seen the "leaked" slide that does not
include MPE. (http://www.theinquirer.net/04120107.htm) One poster on this
list said the slide is about a year old. So like the doctor who arrives
late in the operating room after the patient is already dead, did he just
make the call without getting to do anything about it?

> WHY?
> ====
First, to reply to the few number of e-mails. I did send a message to
Winston for no other reason than to wish him well on an other-wise shitty
day. In fact *I* got a message from someone at ComputerWorld who wanted an
opinion and I forwarded it to others on the list. I think some letters went
to the press instead of Carly.

> ...These are machines that HP hasn't sold or supported in
> nearly 15 years. Are these people "customers?" I'm no
> business major,
> but in my book, a "customer" is a person who buys something from you.

I won't expand on how many business majors at HP ;-), but yes those are
customers. There are subsets of customers that marketing folks like to call
repeat customers and those that are called references. HP has quite a few
of the latter.

> But I

I believe that there is certainly more to it than that. (See below)

> WHO'S TO BLAME?
> ============
> A lot of the rhetoric that has appeared on this list in the last three
> weeks has sought to fix blame on HP for "killing" the HP e3000. It's
> easy, in hindsight, to look back on the last 30 years, (and a
> number of
> the emails that I've responded to have tried to do exactly that) and
> second guess the decisions that HP made.

<snip>
Stuff about advertising
</snip>

There is more to it than JUST advertising. Yes, the market is becoming a
commodity. Does advertising alone fix that? Certainly not. The price
issue does not just fall on just HP's lap however, the applications share in
the blame. Some companies could afford a new machine from HP but not the
incremental costs for the existing software. I won't mention CA..er.any
companies by name. Most of the 'commodisized' software sells differently
than the old tier pricing scheme and that has led to many customers cutting
support and sticking with the existing (reliable) hardware.

As for HP, how do they handle the commodity issue? The auto industry has
gone through two such events. When Ford got into the mass production
business he tried to make the car a commodity. Later the Japanese did the
same. Did the existing auto-makers throw away their high-valued line?
Nope. They came up with a spectrum of products to handle each type of
customer. To help defray the costs, they shared the engineering costs among
the divisions.

(BTW, isn't this what IBM is doing with the AS/400? See:
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/beyondtech/netfinity_server.htm
)

It took a little doing, but eventually the auto companies did well selling
to low and high value customers. The earlier mentioned "leaked" slide even
points to this kind of idea. However, I would say that HP-UX alone may not
give one the highest value available. ;-)

> SO NOW WHAT?
> ===========
> Second guessing the company's decision isn't going to change anything.
> The important thing is to move on with the business at hand - which is
> to help the customers who are still using the HP e3000. There are a
> variety of ways to approach this problem. A number of HP partner
> organizations have developed (or are developing) tools for migrating
> programs from the HP e3000 to other platforms. Beginning in January,
> I'm going to be hosting a series of webcasts on behalf of HP during
> which we'll discuss all the details of the transition in detail. More
> details to come. So stay tuned....

So, HP has not yet adapted to a commodity market. But you wondered, is the
pendulum going to swing back? Folks are buying expensive electric shavers
instead of < 1 USD throw-away razors. I know folks who bought an e-machine
and will never buy one again. If the pendulum swings back, what will HP
have to offer? Only commodity items? What will differentiate HP when
everyone is running Lunix? What value can HP put on the table? A free
database and a well-tuned and well protected transaction oriented system?
What will HP-UX do if Oracle's appliance takes off? When the world is
filled with NT machines that lose data or Lunix machines that won't scale,
will there be a market that will protect one's data and provide upward
compatibility. Who will get that market when this time comes?

I know HP's history keeps the divisions separate, but they have to work
together to compete in this market. This is one of Carly's ideas that I
actually liked. Break down the walls. Unfortunately, it has been more of a
pruning exercise than a cross-breeding. Is it too late for some
convergence? Can the CSY folks add value to HP-UX or Linux?

I guess my point is that we can blame the market and go away or get off our
collective asses and figure out a way to make money in it. Somebody is.
Why not us?

That's all for now, I'm sure there's more where that came from...

Mark

(With all of the links, my messages are starting to resemble Wirt's. Well,
maybe not in content but certainly they are well documented...)

Just because we are paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get us but .....
If we each had a dollar for every slide/webpage/etc an HP person presented
or made public that failed to mention the hp3000 in a list of their
computer offerings, we would have all retired by now! Sadly, omitting the
hp3000 from HP materials during the last 10 or 15 years has unfortunately
been the rule rather than the exception.

Brian Duncombe br...@triolet.com http://www.triolet.com
voice: 1-877-TRIOLET (874-6538) (905)632-2773 fax: (905) 632-8704
"Inside every large program is a small one struggling to get out"
C.A.R. Hoare

Damn, I forgot the footnote:

[1] The only exception that I can think of was when SCO released
a bunch of circa-1984 software within the last few years. After
a decade or more, there's no risk in having the newly released
Open Source software compete with your current offerings.

[...]

Does this fall under my (belated) "moldy code" exception? Or are there
actually enough of these systems out there that they might cost HP business?

Cortlandt Wilson
(650) 966-8555

Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] The Real Story About HP's Announcement...

So, Jim:

What do we do, send emails supporting Open MPE to hp so that can get the
ball rolling, huh? Sounds like from George Stachnik there isn't the
groundswell of support for this approach we all (at least on this list)
expected?

Regards

John M Penney
Systems Programmer / Administration
Production Services
Information Services Department
Pierce County
Tacoma, WA
253-798-6215
jpe...@co.pierce.wa.us

>>> Jim Phillips <jim_ph...@THERMOLINK.COM> 12/04/01 06:46AM >>>
Jonathan M. Backus <JMBa...@TechGroupMD.com> points out:

> I didn't hear that OpenMPE is dead or alive. In fact, I distinctly heard
> *nothing* on the subject, at least not from George ;)

Yes, it (OpenMPE) is conspicuous by its absence. However, the gist of
george's message (and the party line from HP since the Announcement) is that
the 3000 is dead, dead, dead.

Given HP's apparent reluctance to deal with OpenMPE, and the very real
timeline (deadline?) that HP has announced, coupled with the fact that I'm
going to have to present some alternatives soon in order to get funding for
what ever we decide to use in place of the 3000, if OpenMPE is not a viable
option soon (like in the next 30 - 90 days) then OpenMPE will not be an
option for us, since once we commit time and energy to starting conversion
(which we must do in the next 6 months, a year at the latest), it will be a
very hard sell to turn the tide.

I suppose I should explain "OpenMPE is not a viable option soon". I don't
mean that OpenMPE has to be ready to roll by then, but there must be more
signs of life than is shown today. A commitment from HP to release the
source would be nice. An entity in place to receive that source would be a
prerequisite.

I certainly hope that there is (lots) more going on behind the scenes than I
am privy to. That is my hope for OpenMPE.

Jim Phillips Information Systems Manager
Email: jim_ph...@thermolink.com Therm-O-Link, Inc.
Phone: 330-527-2124 P. O. Box 285
Fax: 330-527-2123 10513 Freedom Street
Web: http://www.tolwire.com Garrettsville, OH 44231

I WANT MY MPE!

How many US companies would buy Mercedes for their fleet cars? You're not
selling HP3000s to yuppies.

The ones who didn't went out of business or were bought by Ford or GM, who
applied commodity methods to producing a "high end" commodity vehicle that
was good enough even if it was no Duesenberg.

There's a bunch of non-commodity cars, but they tend to be special purpose
machines: construction equipment, recreational vehicles, military, that sort
of thing. Stewart and Stevenson here in Houston make some amazingly cool
offroad trucks, but they're not Duesenberg either.

Guy Avenell
www.hptraderonline.com HP reverse auction trading floor.

I'll have to disagree here a bit - I would class BMW, Mercedes, Audi (but
not VW) as non-commodity cars, and I don't think they are "special purpose
machines" but rather represent what HP used to be - extra added value cars
for people willing to spend the money for clear tangible (and sometimes
intangible) benefits. And they seem to be doing well, mostly (except
for the ill-considered Daimler-Chrysler thing, but you know how big
mergers can go 8^)).

If you study the car business in detail, you can learn some things about mass
markets in general. One thing that I've always read is that even in hard times
there's always a market for the high end of the product line. What tends to
happen, though, is that the mid-line product purchasers tend to slide lower
in the product line.

The other interesting thing I've learned recently about the car business
is that Ron Zarella (sp?), the CEO of GM, has admitted recently that the
pure "brand management" and commodity approach they have been taking has
NOT been working and has hired Bob Lutz (ex-Chrysler) to fix the perceived
"product problem."

Note also that GM recently cancelled the entire Oldsmobile product
line, the oldest "brand" in the portfolio.

--
Greg Cagle
gregc at gregcagle dot com

I think there is another interpretation of "product leadership", which
translates into market share and "mindshare". I think the analysis is
incomplete without the concept of "value" (read price) but to use the
analysis as stated it would seem that "product leadership" won out as
application vendors strongly favored the leaders.

Cortlandt Wilson
(650) 966-8555

X-no-Archive:yes

There's irony in this statement, and under better circumstances, it could be
the basis of some rich humor. I realize that George wrote that * most * of
the decisions were based on price, from which I infer that not all were
based on price. But I think there must be more to it than that.

In 1997, two guys from CSC Index wrote "The Disciplines of Market Leaders"
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201407191/qid=1007582157/sr=1-1/ref
=sr_1_26_1/104-9519958-7987927>. Amazon reviewers gave it 4.5 out of 5
stars, although I am confident other texts would bear out similar
disagreement with the idea that price is the top three criteria, such as
those listed in the "also bought" or "explore similar" lists.

The authors write that customers buy from vendors on the basis of
"operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy".
Translating these terms into ordinary language, I see them as price,
quality, and service. But they also state that no one can do all three.
Rather, you can excel in one, be adequate in a second, and have to neglect
the third, and I think that common customer experience bears this out. Of
these three criteria, one will make the decision, one will be nice to have,
and one we choose to live without, and we buy from the merchant who can meet
our valuation of those criteria.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
"That in some fields of his country there are certain shining stones of
several colors, whereof the Yahoos are violently fond..." Gulliver's
Travels, Chapter 7, http://www.litrix.com/gulliver/gulli035.htm

I can't vouch for the reality of the "free compilers", I sure can't think of
many, but in any case what business model should have HP used to pay for the
significant cost of creating and supporting compilers? Frankly I don't
believe there is a better one.

Yes I think HP made mistakes, perhaps fatal mistakes, with the HP e3000 but
I don't think they were the ones that you recount. The fact that you are
looking to replace MPE/iX with Linux demonstrates the bind that HP was in.

Cortlandt Wilson
(650) 966-8555

Regards,
Jim

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *

Marketing Excellence.
Not many people say M$ software is the best, simply that it is pervasive
(just as BETA was technologically superior but disappeared at the hands of
VHS marketing).

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of course people switch to Linux-products. for your good money
when buying from M$ you get "failure" to work.

That seems to be true, although *some* high-end folks do slip into the mid-
line but not in the same numbers as mid to low.

GM and Chrysler may be moving in very different directions now. GM's brand
management was simply to rebrand similar cars and create an illusion of
choice. Chrysler, OTOH, was borrowing engineering to create new vehicles.
The PT cruiser borrows a lot from the Neon and the Durango from the light
trucks and mini-van. Like GM, they killed the Plymouth label but that is
not the same as killing any particular car as there was a lot of
duplication among the brands.

Under Ignatio Lopez, GM starting focusing on price, price, price. This
made the line stagnant and ruined the relationship with the suppliers.
Look at how Saturn, the Invent of GM, is now under full GM control and has
had little breakthrough since its opening bell. Now Daimler is ruining the
supply chain for Chrysler with the same kind of price-price-price thinking.

As for Peter's comments, my point is not that all auto-companies handle the
commodity change well, but some did. Which path will HP follow? Will they
cross-engineer and add value like the former Chrysler or become stagnant
and lose market-share in a commodity market like GM?

But those aren't the kind of "non-commodity cars" companies tend to buy.
They are not targeted towards fleets, but rather towards individuals.

Buying the best because it's the best, that's something that will sell
small numbers of machines to individuals or to roles in a fleet where
status matters: top sales guys, executives, public relations.

Selling the HP3000 like a luxury car, that's like selling a Pininfarina
or Shelby customized tractor. You have to sell it on "what will this do
for the company", not some vague "quality".

As I read this, the antecedent of "his" in "to his in box" is the unnamed
CSY staffer, and not you personally. Unverifiable statements are not only
not right, they are not even wrong. They are a horse of a different stripe.

For the record, I was the fellow at your and Alvina's HP World seminar at
the Hilton on the e3000 and the Internet, who had you sign his copy of "The
Legacy Continues". The irony for me was profound that my own paper was
opposite Dave Snow's on e3000 directions, so attendance was sparse, and I
only saw one MPEer that I knew personally.

All the best.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

Cortlandt Wilson wrote:

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It could of be lot more than 50-60 per hour, if we could hope that sending
emails to you would change anything....

Greg

Free is relative. I pay Microsoft about $4,000 CAD (~2,600 USD)
annually for the MSDN enterprise kit. This gives me every piece of
software that Microsoft sells, including all their operating systems,
every one of their development tools, all of the manuals, etc; plus
monthly updates together with online and telephone support for a full
year. For another $1,500 I can have a wintel box suitably sized for
development. So for five and half grand I am in business as a
developer for MS. It has been thus since 1994 when I first joined
their program.

What comparable service did HP ever offer their developer community?
The first and the last attempt was the developer's 918LX so far as I
am aware. What was the comparable cost of entry together with
software support costs for the first year?

HP's business goal was (or should have been) to make their HP3000
product attractive for consumers. Their consumer was small business.
What makes a particular computer system attractive to a small
business are applications, preferably cheap applications. That means
a computer company needs to entice as many developers to develop for
their products as possible.

Making compiler development a profit centre in this case is
ridiculous. It isn't realistic to expect that independent
developers have the resources to fund the development of tools for a
particular platform. The vast majority of computers aren't purchased
for development but for application use. A high entry cost to
developers simply acts to limit the supply of new applications and
thus reduces the overall competitiveness of your real product.

I don't believe that HP's business model for the HP3000 was the best
possible. I certainly don't believe that their model for funding
compiler and other application development tools made much sense at
all after 1990.

Regards,
Jim

CSY's 918DX program morphed into HP's CSP (which begat CSPP,
which begat DSPP :). The program was open to pretty much any
company that wished to write/port applications to the 3000. You
had to be a Premier member (if my terminology is correct) to get
the real benefits of the program, but for your $850/year USD, you
received yearly MPE/iX updates with most subsys "developer" tools
(compilers, debugging tools, etc), hefty hardware discounts, and
some marketing exposure by HP (ok, don't everyone laugh at once
about that one :). There were some rough spots, but overall it
is a nice and inexpensive program for small developers.

Regards,
Michael L Gueterman
Easy Does It Technologies LLC
http://www.editcorp.com
voice: 888.858.EDIT or 573.368.5478
fax: 573.368.5479
--

Well let me see...

We were ready to place an order for a new N-Class machine(quote #
ETP-00797-##)when the announcement was made, which we canceled. How many
e-mails do $200K+ correspond to.

Regards
Paul Christidis

And in the early days of Windows vs OS/2, the M/S SDK was significantly
cheaper than the IBM SDK for OS/2. Of course M/S won, because it was
cheaper for the developers to write applications for Windows than OS/2. As
has been stated by other posters, businesses buy solutions.

Before 1990, HP worked closely with 3rd party software providers. Also
consultants/contractors.

Yes

Let me be dumb here (I do it well). Just how much does it cost to develope
a Cobol compiler? (Put you language here) The specifications do not
change all that often.

When did HP anounce the first demise of the 3000? (The one that was
canceled.) Anyway, HP hasn't done anything with/for the 3000 for about the
last 10 years. Just letting it slowly fade away, so that it would get to a
level that would justify killing it. I think it will work this time.

Ric
r...@consultants-inc.com

Sorry for the confusion...

-geo

You also have support cost of fixing bugs. And retargeting costs for
PA-RISC and now IPF.

Implementing the COBOOL 85 standard took effort and the follow up Intrinsic
functions.

It was enough to keep me busy for 12 years.

I was getting approx 60-70 emails per hour on that fateful Wednesday.
This volume tapered down to approx 40/hr later in the evening.
That night I needed to empty my "deleted folders" and I had 1,008
messages on that day alone -- a record for me. I assume there were
many on this list that saw similar email traffic...

FWIW,
Jeff

> Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] The Real Story About HP's Announcement...
>
...

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