> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of J Dolliver
> 
> <<snip>>
> 
> [bottom line:] these shops
> also didn't spend much money buying new systems and so
> that didn't help HP continue to invest in the platform.
> <<snip>>
> 
> Lets blame the buying public for the demise of the HP3000....Nice...

this can be argued a number of ways, but I believe the general consensus is that this is capitalism at it's finest: the HP3000 did NOT have "built in/planned obsolesence", so the opportunity for replacement-sales was a bit low ;)  [i.e., it's not like brakes on a car that need to be replaced every so often because they are EXPECTED to wear out]  With a flat, or even declining, sales curve, it was seen as a lost cause [never mind the oversight of forgetting the side-effects of income via support contracts...]

Of course, if you want to fix blame "somewhere", you can even afix it to the third-party support vendors: they were scarfing up that residual [and presumably every-increasing] income that I mentioned in the last sentance above, so it WASN'T really "income" --for HP--.

Long story short, there are too many factors in play to say that any one of them was the "cause" of the decision to discontinue the platform.  Just take comfort in the fact that history is likely to repeat itself -- those "kids" that are getting comfortable with windows or linux now may find themselves in the same boat we're in should something "better" [or simply more ubiquitous] comes along in another 15-20 years...

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