Jeff Kell writes:
 
>What's even worse, the August 1996 _HP_Professional_ has a cover story
>article (sort of) on "Building Client-Server Computing on the HP3000"
>and Hewlett-Packard has a two-page HP3000 ad on pages 12-13.
 
For all the protestations that are made by the various organizations such as
Interex and The HP Professional about their minimizations of MPE (quite
often, a total absence) as a necessary result of their looking to the future,
the MPE community continues to be core constituency (and revenue generator)
for everyone involved.
 
At HPWorld '96, the demographics of the audience were overwhelmingly MPE, as
best I could estimate from the questions that were asked and answered at
sessions such as the Management Roundtable, which were open to everyone,
regardless of preferred operating system.
 
Similarly, and perhaps even more oddly, The HP Professional has gone out of
its way to say that it is NOT an HP3000 publication -- and has apparently
restricted the great majority of its articles to non-HP3000 topics. Yet, in
the issue several months ago that Charlie Simpson made that claim, I counted
up the number of HP3000-directed ad pages and found (if I remember correctly)
that they represented 60% of the ad revenue for that issue of the magazine --
and I have done this for each issue since. HP3000-directed advertising has
consistently accounted for 50 to 80% of the ad revenue of the magazine.
 
Clearly, some significant fraction of that ad revenue is coming off of
contracts signed some time ago, contracts  which are not likely to renewed,
if anyone in the various marketing departments is paying attention; the HP
Professional has become of only very marginal value to anyone running an
HP3000. Continuing to place advertisements extolling the virtues of an HP3000
product there would have to be considered of debatable value.
 
The question of importance remains, though, not only for The HP Professional,
but for all other such organizations that chase after the non-HP3000 "systems
of the future": Is there anyone out there to make up the economic difference,
much less expand their revenue base as they had hoped, once you decide to
abandon the HP3000 base?
 
The HP3000 population base clearly is not as large as some other platforms,
but it is a surprisingly cohesive group that represents a great deal of
wealth, not only in monetary terms, but also in experience, that cannot be
easily duplicated.
 
Wirt Atmar