Hello Friends:

After I read Glenn Koster's summary of this week's Carly Fiorina
Interop speech, I was grateful for the vigilance of customers on this
list. No, she did not mention MPE in an appropriate place during her
speech. Nice catch, Glenn.

He then wonders, as some might, if her omission is " the death knell
from Carly for MPE, or a challenge to greater openness, increased
emphasis on Posix?"

My take is against the "death knell." Next to my keyboard is a swell
HP World giveaway, one of those stress balls. (You might wonder how
there could be any stress walking down your hallway to work in the
mornings, to write and talk on the phone all day. I wonder, too, but
in deadline this week, I am squeezing.)

This stress ball was an HP giveaway. On it is the company's mantra du jour:

Any platform
Any brand
Any time

At some level, HP gets it. But to do this, it is submerging its
notice of individual brands [like the 3000] to promote the whole HP,
as a company that will make whatever you choose work for you. I think
that Carly's speechwriters don't consider NT or Linux as brands.
HP-UX is a different matter, since HP thinks that is something they
invented. (So says HP VP Duane Zitzner in our Q&A interview for
October. The top technologist for the company's servers says, "We
were fragmenting the brand. What happened what that it wasn't
Hewlett-Packard that was important, it was 3000. Or 9000, or
NetServer or Vectra. And that's not a brand. Hewlett-Packard is the
brand.")

Clearly, this is a place where Carly's speechwriter messed up, by
including HP-UX (an oldstyle brand) and leaving out another. Seeing
this mistake, I went to the plea that 3000 division GM Winston
Prather posted on this list a month ago, to figure out what I should
do. He said:

"I'm sure there will be places that MPE is not mentioned, sometimes
appropriately, sometimes not. I would ask that you don't immediately
turn on the 'flame throwers,' but rather point out these instances so
that we can continue to correct the problem."

So here I am, using Glenn's vigilance to point out this instance.
Yes, I think Always On should include MPE/iX at every mention, if
you're going to mention any oldstyle brands at all. But if Always On
is a Superdome thing,  then her speechwriters might be a little bit
unaware of the Dome's capabilities. That's the problem with
mentioning ANY brand of operating environment -- then you gotta
mention them all.
--

Ron Seybold, Editor In Chief
The 3000 NewsWire
Independent Information to Maximize Your HP 3000
http://www.3000newswire.com
512.331.0075 -- [log in to unmask]