Seems to me that we could pass this up to INTEREX and have them sort out
what is left for HP3000 users, or have they also abandoned the flock.


Speak up INTEREX....

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On
Behalf Of Roy Brown
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2004 7:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [HP3000-L] Users Lobby for MPE Support


[log in to unmask] wrote:
> John Burke wrote :
>
> > Patrick Thibodeau, writing in Computerworld, tells a story that is very
> > relevant to the current OpenMPE Board of Director's election:
> http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/story/0,10801,91451,00.html

> Where it says (concerning the release of MPE to OpenMPE later this year
> ) :

> "HP doesn't see the need to make a decision this year, said David Wilde,
> HP's e3000 business manager, who stressed that the company must act in
> "the best overall interest" of the e3000 user base.
> Wilde said a decision to license the source code might prompt some
> customers to replace their transition plans with an alternative that may
> not meet their needs, simultaneously hurting HP business partners that
> provide migration services. "We don't help anybody if we do damage to
> that overall value chain," he said. "

> I take this to mean "If we make it easier for people to homestead on
> MPE, they will be unlikely to migrate, perhaps to our HP-UX systems
> which will lose us money".

> How can concern about damaging the "overall value chain" really be
> serving the best interests of the HP3000 community?
> Just wondering..?
> Cheers,
> John Dunlop

I don't quite know what to think here. Unquestionably, the quotes are
bollocks, but even as bollocks, it’s damaging to HP. But where in HP is it
coming from? Was Dave Wilde talking in turn, or out of turn? Does he
actually believe this stuff, or is he so deeply, deeply, uncomfortable with
what he's having to say and do that we are getting emotional leakage?

It's either someone who is so tied in to an HP position on this that he
cannot remotely see the effect his words will have had, or someone who has
been told to put a point of view, and has put it like that because, try as
he might, he can't see how to dress it up defensibly.

(Maybe Dave Wilde is the latter, and his managers are the former - who
knows?)

Of course, it is interesting that Dave sees it *as* a value chain. Silly us,
we thought it was about HP helping us as much as they could, in recompense
for discontinuing the HP3000. But no, in the ‘new HP’, it seems that a
funeral is not a time for grieving, but a golden opportunity to sell life
insurance at the wake.

Maybe that’s why HP did the thing that I think is the most unforgivable in
all this? Not to discontinue the HP3000 – where I guess we do perhaps need,
however reluctantly, to buy HP’s economics, even if they were self-inflicted
wounds – but to provide no clear migration path.

Supposing when HP had announced the death of the HP3000, they had said “But
we will be providing a compatibility option on HP-UX” – just as they did
when PA-RISC replaced the Classics – and put together a package that was
near or near enough, certainly for well-behaved user applications that
eschewed Priv Mode stunts and suchlike?

Could they have? I think so. Or, since they would probably have to use third
party tools like Eloquence, etc., did HP say ‘Hey, we can’t favour one
partner over the others here’? And so, rather than perhaps disfavouring one
or two existing Platinum partners, they disfavoured the entire HP3000 user
base?

It’s been my view for quite a while now that OpenMPE have been putty (or
should that perhaps be putzes?) in the hands of HP, being strung along with
promise after promise, and plausible delay after plausible delay, by the HP
code-teasers.

(I don’t know if you have the expression I allude to here – though the last
two letters of the first word are different – in the US? But it is,
conventionally, a reference to girls who seem to promise more than they ever
intend to deliver).

And all the while the clock ticks on, and peoples’ options narrow down, and
more and more of those who perhaps thought that Open MPE would be their
saviour can’t hack the uncertainty, and have to make some alternative
migration – some of them, no doubt, along the HP ‘approved’ route.

Not helped, of course, by the fact if it were UK-based, you couldn’t call
the organisation OpenMPE – it would be a breach of the Trades Descriptions
Act to use the word ‘Open’ for an organisation that, despite being nominally
a user body, seems to shroud so much of what it does under such an
unprecedented veil of secrecy. Which no doubt also delights HP…...


Now Dave Wilde, and his managers in HP might have been *thinking* what Dave
has been quoted as saying, and we might have been *suspecting* they thought
that, but until now, we didn’t actually *know*.

But this is what I have been thinking for a while now, and it seems to be
finally confirmed – HP want to string OpenMPE along, until it’s too late for
as many HP3000 users as possible.

You have to wonder *why* he said it, though. Did HP want it said? Are they
so far removed from the on-the-ground reality that they thought it wouldn’t
matter if it was said? Or don’t they care it was said? Or do they perhaps
now heartily wish it hadn’t been said?

It’s been put somewhat inelegantly, a touch indelicately, and even a bit
nakedly, true.  HP seem to be suggesting that if OpenMPE got what it wanted,
then not only would that impact the revenues of HP’s Platinum migration
partners, but that those foolish HP3000 users might be tempted to actually
try to *use* OpenMPE. And, in some mysterious and unspecified way, thereby
hurt their own businesses, as well as that of HP and its partners.

HP, of course, knows what is in the “best overall interest” of the HP3000
user base. I mean, there we all were, clinging on to this outmoded and
unusable box, until HP came along and severed the apron strings. Of course!
They were just ‘being cruel to be kind’. How could we be so blind as not to
see it? Silly, silly, us.

One last question remains for Open MPE. We now know HP are going to string
OpenMPE along until it is too late for as many people as possible. But what
then? Finally offer to license MPE, in the fairly certain hope that it will
no longer be economically viable for anyone to take them up on it? Or renege
completely?

And one last question remains for the rest of us. Dave Wilde is quoted as
saying “HP doesn't see the need to make a decision this year” on this issue.
Acting, he claims, in "the best overall interest" of the e3000 user base.

Well Dave, I have news for you. The number one strategic issue for that
e3000 user base is that HP *do* make that decision. On the Interex-run 2004
MPE System Improvement Ballot, Strategic Issues, the top ballot item, with
1163 votes, over 17% of the votes cast, was ‘By the second half of 2004,
announce the decision for whether the MPE/iX source code will be licensed to
one or more third parties’.

Surely HP are not planning to simply ignore the topmost user concern, as
expressed in that valuable user survey, one of those which are so valuable
to HP, providing valuable feedback, which you value?

Roy Brown

I want you to go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell:
"I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."
(Peter Finch as Howard Beale, Network, 1976).

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