At 10:47 AM 11/3/03 +0100, Christian Lheureux wrote:
>One thought that comes to my mind is this :
>
>The 3000 was extraordinarily successful, based on a 70s-vintage marketing
>concept, i.e. an excellent product offering (MPE, Image, and so forth),
>supplemented by some moderate sales knack from the various sales forces,
>barely enough to sustain a reasonable income level, at least enough to
>guarantee a self-sustainable business model.
>
>Now that paradigm is outdated, and has been for quite a while. As other
>marketing concepts show us, it's not technical excellence that drives sales,
>it's the other way around, i.e. profit derived from strong sales driving R&D
>and product improvement. That's what the market yells at us, loud and clear.
>See what happens with Windows, Microsoft Office, SQL Server, Proliant,
>Oracle, SAP, and many other products. Technical excellence, I regret to say,
>has become, if not outright a liability or otherwise an impediment to a
>successful business model, at the very least a secondary preoccupation. Yes
>my friends, while we were preaching the choir (i.e, ourselves and each
>other) and praising our beloved technical excellence, others were busy
>designing relevant business models.

The only way to support this business model, the way we were accustomed to
having HP support it, was to charge accordingly.  That made the 3000 look
expensive, relative to Wintel and Unix and Linux platforms (among others).
Unfortunately, HP didn't defend it's pricing model with it's other inherent
advantages, and the model fell out of favor.  It's too bad they didn't...it
stlll appears to have overall cost advantages.

John Lee

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