John R. Wolff wrote:
> >But Standards are more important.
>
> As a user I respectfully disagree that Standards are more important than
> compatibility.  This has been the problem with HP thinking in the last
> several years  --  standards compliance at the expense of everything else.
> Standards are of interest to vendors like HP so they can try and get new
> customers from other standards based competitors.

While I agree that in this particular case there seems to be little reason
for HP to remove the offending subroutines, in general standards are more
important than backwards-compatibility, as the market has clearly shown.
People buy computers to run software and there is much more (and cheaper)
software for standard computers than for idiosyncratic computers.

It doesn't matter much whether the standards are de facto or de jure, what
matters most is popularity.  Software development costs (not including
support) are fixed costs, so software for idiosyncratic systems will always
cost more and users of idiosyncratic systems will always have many fewer
choices.

Those users who care most about backwards compatibility don't have to
upgrade.   If you think you really, really, must upgrade because some
software or hardware is only supported on the new version, that's exactly
the point: it's more important for you to have the features supported on the
popular version than to avoid the compatibility headaches.

Whether MPE is superior to system X is as irrelevant as whether Steve Job's
NeXT was superior to Windows.  Of course it was, but it was also more
expensive, only ran on one manufacturer's hardware, had a fraction of the
software available and was toooooooooooooo laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.   We all
run Windows and curse its shortcomings.  We all run Windows because that's
what software runs on.  My can opener never crashes but it can't run JRE
1.3, either!  My can opener doesn't have USB ports, so it can't connect to
my DSL modem.  My can opener does not support standard e-mail, much less
S/MIME and PGP.  My can opener does not have a decent word processor.  And
even if it did have a decent word processor, I couldn't find printer drivers
for all the great ink-jet printers out there!  My can opener only has
partial support for CSS1, much less CSS2!!

Those of you who think that if only HP had done X or Y or Z, MPE would have
thrived need to get a reality check.  MPE was doomed a decade ago.  The most
popular system (AS/400) in the class survived, the others did not.
***ALLLLL*** other minicomputer operating systems are either dead or dying.
It's not just MPE, it's VAX and Sequent and Tandem and NCR and Unisys and
ICL and Data General and Stratus and Wang and Convex and Honeywell and the
dozens of others.  The most popular system won and all the others lost.  All
of them. That's it. End of story.  Bye-bye.

Perhaps those who think that the failure of MPE is due to HP's marketing
ineptitude might like to explain why the very same company is a market
leader in both the PC and Unix markets?  Maybe they do in fact know why
people buy computers and that's why they put their efforts into those
expanding markets instead of MPE?

Sorry, that was my semi-annual tirade.

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *