George Stachnik writes:

> It's been almost three weeks since HP made its announcement about the
>  e3000.  Since that time, there have been a number of postings here from
>  people who purport to know a great deal about HP's decision, who made
>  it, why it was made, and what should be done (if anything) to reverse
>  it.  In the context of this discussion, there's been a lot more heat
>  generated than light.  A number of things have been said that aren't
>  true, (at least not any longer).  And recently, some private email was
>  posted here for public consumption without my permission.  That's fine -
>  there was nothing confidential in the message - but in the light of some
>  of the rhetoric that's been floating around this list for the past few
>  weeks, I felt it was time to step up and try to set the record straight
>  about a couple of things.

George does us all a service when he wrote what he wrote. It was written with
all of the passion of someone who believes that CSY has done what they have
done for all the right reasons, primarily the protection of the current user
base.

I've listened now four times to George's webcast where he announces the end
of the HP3000, and it's clear from George's voice that that webcast was the
least pleasant thing he had to do that day, and because of George's long and
faithful history with the HP3000, I tend to trust George a great deal, as I
do essentially everyone at CSY. I don't for a minute believe that anyone is
purposefully deceiving us.

Nonetheless, it's important for the people in CSY to understand the reason
that a great many users still feel betrayed. Roy Breslawski wrote quite the
opposite of George's comments just two years ago, but with an equal passion
about the user base not understanding CSY's intentions, in article entitled,
"The HP 3000 -- Here Today and. . . Here Tomorrow". I've quoted just a bit of
it below:

======================================

From my perspective, absolutely, there's a huge difference in the way
customers perceive MPE today and the state of the business and their future.
I was in this job only three weeks before HP World, but even in that time it
was easy to get a sense of what people thought. There was a lot of fear about
the future. When is the bomb really going to drop about MPE going away? And
that [dispelling this fear] was really a key objective at HP World.

Without having the history, I could tell that even within the division here
people thought, "Enough is enough." This has built up long enough. Let's just
get rid of this nonsense about the HP 3000 going away. It just takes up
everybody's energy unproductively, and I think the people who were at HP
World got that message. I think even people beyond there got that message,
but there's still a long way to go. There's a whole universe of people out
there who were not at HP World, and they're not connected through newsgroups
and so on. And it's going to take time to get everyone to that same level of
comfort.

I have to say that in the general HP 3000 user base today the general concern
still is, When is it [the HP 3000] going away? And those are the people who
just haven't gotten the message yet.

=======================================

The entire article (or at least the first part of it) is at:

     http://www.interex.org/hpworldnews/hpw801/mpe/01mpe.html

Wirt Atmar

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