Alfredo writes:
"We will forever wonder what would have happened if someone with
one thousandth of Bill's leadership had been in charge of the
MPE that HP invented."
Maybe the right people were in place and they were just not allowed to do
what they thought was best.
That said, I believe MPE's sucess was an accident. I believe it happened
because some very bright and talented engineering folks were left
unsupervised for a while. While it is true that most of HP seemed at the
time to be innovators, their computer people, for the most part, were not.
They had the HP 1000, the HP 250 and later some workstations, however, these
seemed to be well engineered and implemented clones of already sucessful
ideas that had been "invented" by others.
I think the HP 3000 started out to be a clone of what others had invented.
However, they made such a dramatic improvement by adding world class
features such as IMAGE, VPlus (actually DEL), spooler, batch job, JCL, etc.
that unlike some of its competitors, the machine could scale very well.
However, since this was not serious business, this little division was left
relatively alone and they and others like Alfredo, Eugene, the Allegriods,
Ross Scroggs, Summit, Amisys, SGA, the various user's groups, ASK and COGNOS
were able to turn in into something spectacular at the time.
It's decline seems to have happened when the people who were really in
charge started to assert their right to follow. What this means is what I
like to call "management by industry analyst". The industry analyst say
that proprietary is dead (nevermind that HP had the poster child to disprove
the myth), ergo, lets follow the UNIX trend and do it better than anyone
else. Obviously, since the industry analyst say MPE is dead, let's treat it
like it is and, God forbid, not let anyone know we have it. At this point,
the people we thought were in charge CSY, lost their ability to improve the
product line and it was abandoned by HP.
A few years ago, I spoke with, or rather listened to, a very well known CSY
employee who was angry and frustrated at the time. He expressed similar
sentiments to those above. I wonder how many dedicated and capable CSY
employees share the same or similar views.
For and example of what the HP 3000 could have become, you simply need to
look at the IBM iSeries. It is "proprietary", it has a built in database,
spooler, batchjob processor, etc. However, it's is also completely up to
date. Not only can you operate it with a GUI, you can develop "green
screen", GUI, and Web applications from a JAVA based interative development
environment. It's vendors have support from IBM in ways that HP 3000
vendors can only dream of. There are software development kits and
"Redbooks" to show you how to do stuff. It scales from the smallest machine
to ones that support 10,000+ users. You can also run Linux, Windows and
UNIX applications on the same box! I guess the people in charge of the IBM
iSeries didn't get the word that proprietary is dead, they just kept on
innovating.
Fred White doesn't work for HP anymore. He made a significant contribution
to the sucess of the platform. What do you think Fred, am I being unfair?
Charles Finley
Transformix Computer Corporation
Oceanside, CA
(760) 439-3146
-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of F. Alfredo Rego
Sent: Friday, August 30, 2002 4:59 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Upcoming HP e3000 Product Announcement Web Cast
Robert Mills <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>Many many many years ago, when Windows was still an idea in Gates head,
Bill Gates (whether you like "his" products or not) certainly
has done his best (whether you approve of his methods or not) to
convert an ugly duckling (early Windows) into the Mighty Potent
Enterprise (MPE) that it is now.
We will forever wonder what would have happened if someone with
one thousandth of Bill's leadership had been in charge of the
MPE that HP invented.
Why am I so interested in studying "leadership", you ask? Please
see http://www.svwc.com for a taste of an annual event that was
founded by my kids' school a few years ago: The Sun Valley
Writers' Conference. This year's theme was "Does Truth Matter?"
In fact, two of my kids worked at the conference's bookstore as
part of their college-money long-term projects (which start when
they enter 9th grade). Everyone in the relatively small audience
had the pleasure of interacting with writers such as David
McCullough, David Halberstam, Ryszard Kapuscinski (who speaks
great Spanish and chatted with us about his adventures in
Guatemala), Jean Strouse, Jane Hamilton, Anne Lamott, John Burnham
Schwartz, Roger Wilkins, Frank McCourt, Ridley Pearson (who lives
in the Sun Valley area), Dave Barry (who enjoys playing music in a
"band of writers" with Ridley), and so on.
Not a shabby crowd, by any means. I mentioned the sad MPE story
as an interesting "historical case" to a few of them and I asked
them to consider the whole MPE saga from their Pulitzer-Prize
perspectives. As you may remember, Dave Barry gave the opening
speech at Interex's Conference in San Diego (1998). So, he knows
about MPE :-)
There were several interesting parallels between HP's very own MPE
and some historical events related to leadership (or lack thereof).
Dave Barry's final answer to the conference's theme was uncanny:
Does Truth Matter? Not if you have a good lawyer.
Yet another report from the field by your man in the street,
_______________
| |
| |
| r | Alfredo [log in to unmask]
| e | http://www.adager.com
| g | F. Alfredo Rego
| a | Manager, R & D Labs
| d | Adager Corporation
| A | Sun Valley, Idaho 83353-3000 U.S.A.
| |
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