Stigers, Greg [And] wrote:
>
> What bothers me about this (besides us being on of the 200 sites using
> Oracle, and having to explain why we are on an older version of it), is that
> Oracle's absence on the 3000 will keep applications off of the 3000, since
> they almost certainly only run with Oracle. This in turn keeps Oraclers from
> being exposed to the 3K; it is an experience to explain to an Oracler what
> MPE does for them so that they don't have to. And, it removes any hope that
> Oracle and IMAGE/SQL could go 'head-to-head' as the RDBMS for a given
> application. I would expect IMAGE to 'blow the doors off' of Oracle.
>
> I do not have an answer for 'selling' Oracle on the 3000; I sincerely wish I
> did. That it lagged behind in version, and was not included in Oracle
> customer's site licenses for Oracle, cannot help. Even if HP changed their
> mind about not porting v8, I would expect Oraclers to wonder when they will
> get the MPE rug pulled out from under them. Unless HP intends to start
> actively attracting software vendors to port to MPE and IMAGE... now that
> would be a great day.
>
What bothers me even more is HP's INCONSISTENCY.  When a vendor
offers a product
(by converting Oracle to MPE they are in a sense offering a
product even
though they are not actually selling it) and a customer commits
to it to the
tune of tends of thousands if dollars, HP is doing the customer
an injustice
by saying "we will not port the new version".  This has been a
problem with
HP and software for years.  HP DOES NOT UNDERSTAND that in a
customer
installation software doesn't just come and go like the wind.  HP
is very
careful to make hardware upgrades backward compatible, but they
offer
software that customers commit to and then discontinue it with no
compatible successor, leaving the customer no viable
alternative.  Converting
the entire system to UNIX IS NOT a viable alternative.  Come on
HP come up
with a consistent, coherent software strategy for MPE.

Nick D.