X-no-Archive:yes
I agree that there are the application problems, so we only see a small
number of important apps, which really have little or no real competition.
We support an application that does a beautiful job of maintaining a COBOL
source code base that is 100% portable across a number of platforms, while
isolating the platform specific into libraries. It need not be so
problematic to support multiple environments, if done with due care.

But if I completely agreed with you, I would no longer be involved with MPE,
and probably would not be particularly loyal to HP. I am curious about your
involvement, if this is what you believe. What keeps you here?

How "proprietary" is MPE? It both is and isn't. Our Oracle DBAs frequently
just use familiar UNIX / POSIX commands from the CI, and will even work
entirely in the shell. But MPE * is * proprietary. Does that doom it to
eventual extinction? I think that there is at least one list member who
understand extinction rather well, who would disagree. Proprietariness is
not so much hurting the UNIX / Linux variants, nor Microsoft, nor IBM's
OS/390 or OS/400 (which doesn't even have Apache or SAMBA at this time!).
Why should it hurt MPE? It's a state of mind, addressed by marketing! It is
very much HP's choice if they want to be like Unisys, Wang, Data General,
DEC, Prime, or like NT / W2K and the AS/400.

Ken wrote:
> Occassionally there will be a new technology that allows newcomers to
enter
> the market: minicomputers, microprocessors, local area networks, the
> internet.  Thus we had DEC, Microsoft, Apple, Compaq, etc.

The challenge is attracting new users and new customers. Someday, newcomers
may outgrow their lower-end solutions. After they have clustered together a
bunch of Linux or NT / W2K boxes, how happy are they and their customers
with that? Did they do a great job with a great product, or is their
always-on infrastructure always on fire, and some part of your support staff
is always spending its time fighting fires? At what point do these companies
ask if there is a better platform, and what that might be? I think that this
is part of HP's strategy with Linux, in the belief that customers will
outgrow that approach, and what a bigger box running a more slowly changing
OS. Can the e3000 be that box? Why or why not?

Ken wrote:
> If you are a programmer, which system do you want to learn?  Which job
> are you going to take?  The one with the brightest future.

Allow me this digression. The great thing about being a pure IT company (and
not a company that has an IT department) is that our employees can and do
get experience on multiple platforms and products. So if a scripting wizard
wants to try their hand at JCL (or gets assigned to a mainframe project),
they can discover that they love it, and stay, or hate it, and get
reassigned later. A DBA can get an assignment on another DBMS. Employees
need not get locked into one technology or platform, or on older version of
it, unless they want to and the business supports it. I agree with those who
say that this is a driving force in the growth of pure IT service and
consulting companies and the struggle to hire for non-IT companies. Now,
you're a new college grad who has been hearing stories about hiring bonuses
and great salaries and fast-track careers. Who do you want to go to work
for, a company that has in IT department and uses brand x and language y, or
an IT start-up that does e-work on some OSUX using one kind of cgi
scripting, or a large IT provider for whom the sky is the limit, who expect
to continually train its staff? It is here that I expect the e3000 to be
just as viable, and more so, than the AS/400.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com