At 07:47 AM 1/22/02 -0600, you wrote:
>Greg Terterian schrieb:
> >>
>Dear Mr. Winston,  I would like to know what the hell did you do to keep
>those vendors happy (those vendors who had applications for MPE/iX).
><<
>I can second that.

FYI...it's "Mr. Prather"....

And what makes 'those vendors' happy is selling their products.  HP
can provide the opportunity and help them with consulting/etc. to
port their application as well as co-marketing.  But unless the
customer's pony up to the bar and purchase the products there is
little incentive for the vendors to continue to pour resources
into a particular market, no matter how good the solution is.

Oracle pulled off the HP3000 simply because it couldn't sell
enough of their product to warrant the cost of continuing to
invest resources into it.  It indeed was difficult for them
to sell something when the HP3K essentially came with its own
DBMS which the user community enthusiastically promoted over
all others.  Sure, we can go into a lengthy discussion as to
all the reasons why, but the point is they simply didn't sell
a lot of product.

In the meantime, many application vendors focused on supporting
the major DBMS products, in particular Oracle, because the Oracle
relational DBMS was/is a very large market.  So their marketing
opportunity was much larger and this is where they would be able
to make a better return on their investment along with much better
growth opportunities.

Sure, maybe HP could have done things better/different; but then
again, HP3000 users also had choices to make which also affected
the growth of these other application products.  Regardless, I
believe everyone made choices based upon their needs, resources, and
what was in their best interests.  Users decided that the costs
for other DBMS products was too high an investment, Oracle decided
that they weren't getting the return on their investment to
support/maintain this market; application vendors felt that their
future growth would be tied to supporting the Oracle/Sybase/etc.
markets which were much larger than HP/IMAGE, and so forth.

But trying to pin the blame on any one person or event really
doesn't serve any purpose, nor does it demonstrate a potential
acknowledgement of the many things that indeed do impact the market.
I don't profess to know everything, but I do feel that HP/CSY did
their sincere best given the resources and information the had to
work with.

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