John Burke writes:

> This is tough. There are no easy answers as to where new applications are
>  going to come from. However, HP Corporate clearly hurts the HP e3000's
>  prospects by relegating it to niche market status and not promoting it as
at
>  least equal to HP-UX, Linux and NT for hosting mission critical
>  applications.
>
>  As I have said numerous times, it costs nothing in $ and only two seconds
of
>  time to add "MPE/iX" to any recitation of the "HP-UX, Linux and NT" mantra.
>  And nothing bad can happen, unless HP Corporate thinks an analyst or press
>  person asking "What is MPE/iX?" is bad.
>
>  I'd give up my entire contribution if I could hear, preferably Carly
>  Fiorino, but I would settle for Ann Livermore, explain (not marketing
>  gobbledygook) why they steadfastly refuse to do this.

I don't know if you've seen the truly nice, multi-page ad set that HP put in
this week's issue of Computerworld, advertising Superdome.

The first page of this ad set actually encourages me a little bit because it
carries the tag line:

"Introducing hp 9000 superdome, the first enterprise server to have its power
matched by its flexibility. Flexibility that's ready for IA-64, and
flexibility that comes from multiple operating systems like HP-UX, Linux,
Windows 2000, and others yet to be."

It may be reading far too much into the tea leaves to believe that MPE might
be the intended "others yet to be", but I'm enough of an optimist to at least
give it a fair chance of becoming true in the next few years -- and actually
being stated there in the ads.

Wirt Atmar