<<As Cortlandt also said, I think it's reasonable not to expect that the
cost and support for a 918PM be half that for a 918 8-user license
machine.  It just needs to get down to where the cost can be seen to be
in the general ballpark of a high-end PC server.  Then you could make a
case that it is worth that smaller cost differential to get the P&R
advantage of the 3000 in all those small branch offices...  Which of
course means the head office would want to have a big HP 3000 as
DP-central....>>


Aren't we already there? It looks like an end-user-useable (but not
developer-useable) 918LX would be around $15K. As I remember it, we paid
something like $18K for the dual-P133 HP NetServer LS/2 a couple of years
ago, and current NetServer LX's with dual PPro-200s and 128MB RAM are
around $17K (and that's with no hard drive). Those prices are not only in
the same ballbark, they're sitting next to each other on the bench.

Steve