Re: to run or not to run...

While I am all for believing that things will change, and I have the
utmost faith in Winston for his support (and fully well believe that he
is at least as frustrated as us), one point remains.  If we back
off now, we give them another year to essentially continue the status
quo before making any waves.  The timing opportunity of MPE being
slighted in recent statements by Carly and Ann, and the proximity of
HPWorld will not present themselves again for some time (we hope, but
nevertheless they exist now).

In the worst-case scenario for the ad, suppose we run it and Carly makes
a strong pro-e3000 statement in her address to HPWorld.  In a
similar worst-case scenario to not run the ad, suppose we refrain from
the ad and Carly makes another "NT, HPUX, and Linux" statement.

Which scenario is preferable?  If we run the ad and she does mention it,
not that much harm, we had no idea what she would say and the ad would
have gone to press before the fact.  If we don't run it, and we get
snubbed again, we're back where we started.  They have had plenty
of advance warning to give us a plug or two yet even the most recent
statements are still business as usual.

And a final note, we made a lot of comparisons to IBM's advertising.  In
that vein, I'd like to note that their prominent, high-level ads such as
the TV commercials don't even MENTION an OS -- one of my favorites is
the "here's IBM's entry-level web server (guy holding a pizza-box style
thing under his arm) and "here's our enterprise e-commerce server"
(people squished into a freight elevator with a large mainframe looking
box).  They don't sell AIX/Linux/AS400/MVS etc but rather sell their
"web server".  But granted, when they do mention platform, they all
pretty much get equal billing (well, maybe not the MVS and VM guys).

Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>