So, once again in the life of the 3000 the storm clouds are gathering and
the winds are whipping around trying to dislodge the 3000 and blow it away.

The 3000 has weathered many rain showers, squalls, tornadoes, and the
occasional hurricane and earthquake (both figuratively and literally) over
the years and it has always come out the far end looking as good as ever.

In fact the 3000 has shown significantly more resiliency and longevity than
any recent HP CEO.

Hence the survival of the 3000 is probably more a matter of simply grabbing
a tree and hanging on rather than trying to stand up and defy the storm.
It's not necessary to meet the storm on its terms, you simply need to hang
on long enough and eventually the storm will blow itself out.

Of course your average 3000 has no hands with which to hang on during the
storm, so it requires that enough HP employees, application vendors, and
customers keep their grip on it during the stormy weather.  If enough people
let go, then there's no stopping the result even if there are still a lot of
people trying to hang on.

In the current case, it appears to me that those in charge of HP have this
Grand Vision(tm) which will enhance shareholder value through creative use
of internet buzzwords.  This Vision involves an almost religious fervor for
the latest round of "open is good", "proprietary is bad" thinking in the
industry.

This is almost exactly the same thing we went through ten years ago when HP
decided at a high level that HP-UX was the future.  All of the slogans are
the same, it's just that we now have "Internet", "Linux", and "Open Source"
as the nouns rather than "Open Systems", "Unix", "Client/Server", etc.

Someone once said that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle
to the strong, but that's the way to bet.  People who have betting against
the 3000 for the last 15 years must be really tired of losing what looked
like "sure thing" opportunities over and over again.

Of course in some cases they were so sure of the outcome that they never
bothered to check the results of the race.  In reading Joel Birnbaum's
recent comments about Unix, it sounds as though HP's management of the day
felt that they had issued an edict to the effect that "all MPE customers
will be moved to HP-UX because we know that it's the right thing for them"
and some (Joel at least) still assume that it actually happened.
Fortunately the message didn't make it all the way down to the trenches
(though it did a lot of damage in the middle-management levels that we've
been trying to recover from ever since).

Changing the direction of a large ship is hard, changing the direction of a
big company is much harder, and changing the attitudes and direction of
80,000 employees is like trying to herd cats.

One of the things that really worried me a year ago when Carly took over HP
was her statement that she was going to change the thinking and outlook of
every employee in the company.  Maybe there are some companies where this is
possible, but not for the Hewlett-Packard that I'm familiar with :-)

So Carly has her work cut out for her if she wants to really make a
difference.  All of this grand posturing and high level strategic
directional thinking is fine, but things aren't going to change and your
Grand Vision(tm) isn't going to get implemented with nothing but
proclamations from on high.  Some of those people in the trenches and their
management are going to have to take the ball and run with it, and this is
going to have to happen over and over throughout the company if things are
going to actually change.

Glenn quotes Carly:
>     "So, here's what we mean when we talk about Always-On
>     Internet Infrastructure . and this is important because its
>     sets a very high standard- one that very few, if any,
>     vendors can match.

As I said before, I think HP needs to work on its own always-on[-fire]
infrastructure before they go telling people that they know best how to run
their business.

The whole Superdome announcement comes off as if HP is saying "you don't
know how to run your business but we do".  There's a sort of elitist
exclusivity to the whole Superdome program.  You have to convince HP that
you are worthy of even being a prospect for the machine or they won't talk
to you about it.  HP will decide whether your technical people are competent
enough to be trusted with their machine.  HP will move in and live with you
and tell you how you should do things because HP knows the Internet and you
don't.

HP kind of comes across as a "wannabe" who is behaving as though they know
everything about everything, yet they seem long on posturing and short on
grunt-level detail.  It's no wonder that the press doesn't seem to get
excited no matter what the quantity of smoke, lasers, and dramatic speeches
by executives at their announcements.

The HP-e3000 is one of the few places where HP actually delivers on the new
promises that Carly is touting.

>     Technology is changing so fast, that to bet a business on
>     proprietary technology . or on a single technology .
>     commits an IT environment to becoming a legacy environment.

Or a Legendary environment.

HP-UX changes radically every couple years, Windows every year, and Linux
every month.  I can think of no more guaranteed way of becoming a "legacy"
(in all the negative senses) operation than to be using one of these
platforms for your business.

Can some one tell me why a business would *want* to be in the Information
Technology business in addition to making widgets, or selling insurance, or
whatever they did before there was all this whizzbang technology to play
with?

Stability does not imply lack of flexibility at all.  IBM's mainframe OSes
now support things like Posix and Java for example.  Any of the remaining
"proprietary" platforms can play all the same games that any of the current
"main stream" platforms can, and at the same time they can continue to run
all of your Legendary Applications as well.

Glenn wrote:
> There was a lot more to the speech - and some interesting discussions may
> come of it.  What I wanted to point out is that Carly has once again done
> the despicable... but she went a step further (I believe).  She failed to
> mention MPE/iX at a time when it was appropriate.

Again, I think it's clear that the people steering HP (or at least turning
the wheel, since it's not yet clear whether that wheel is attached to
anything or not) believe that they are out to Change The World (or at least
the stock price) and this plan involves promoting those of their children
whom they perceive as being the smart, good looking, intelligent ones, and
not the funny looking stepchild who sleeps in the cupboard under the stairs.

While there is a tempting desire to respond to this by sending Carly a
"howler" via Owl Post in the Wall Street Journal, it's questionable whether
this will accomplish anything positive.  MPE will never be part of the
"popular crowd" in Carly's world, but there will always be that other world
where simplicity, stability, and reliability are valued over this week's
self-delusional fashion trend.

Writer Theodore Sturgeon once wrote that "90% of everything is crud" (and
this seems to be rather generous when applied to the computer industry).
Using this statement, anything which is popular or which has a significant
market share must therefore be crud.  But it also says that there will
always be that 10% of available products that will not be crud, and that
there should also be 10% of customers who might actually want to buy
something that's not crud.

Bill and Dave's Hewlett-Packard was specifically in the business of making
that 10% of products and selling them to that 10% of customers, and the HP
3000 was one of those products and 3000-L represents that group of
customers.

G.