In article <[log in to unmask]>,
[log in to unmask] says...

> > Lets blame the buying public for the demise of the HP3000....Nice...

That's who I'd blame.  When Google Inc was deciding what computers to
buy (these had to be very secure, stable and very fast), they probably
didn't spend much time wondering if MPE was the right choice.  Even if
current skill sets were not a factor then presumably it was something to
do with performance.  Why wouldn't it be the same for other companies.
Without new customers coming in the income will just go down - if they
didn't ditch it they'd not be interested in making money.  So the
company wouldn't last so long.

Or do I have an over simplistic view?  Seems simple to me but then I'm
not that knowledgable about MPE.

Maybe the argument is that HP had let MPE lag behind too much by then.

> this can be argued a number of ways, but I believe the general consensus is that this is capitalism at it's finest: the HP3000 did NOT have "built in/planned obsolesence", so the opportunity for replacement-sales was a bit low ;)  [i.e., it's not like brakes on a car that need to be replaced every so often because they are EXPECTED to wear out]  With a flat, or even declining, sales curve, it was seen as a lost cause [never mind the oversight of forgetting the side-
effects of income via support contracts...]

What OS has built in obsolesence?  I can think of DOS with it's 640Kb
limit but that was fixed later.  16 bit Windows but that evolved (OK -
got re-written from scratch) into something very different but related.

> Of course, if you want to fix blame "somewhere", you can even afix it to the third-party support vendors: they were scarfing up that residual [and presumably every-increasing] income that I mentioned in the last sentance above, so it WASN'T really "income" --for HP--.
>
> Long story short, there are too many factors in play to say that any one of them was the "cause" of the decision to discontinue the platform.  Just take comfort in the fact that history is likely to repeat itself -- those "kids" that are getting comfortable with windows or linux now may find themselves in the same boat we're in should something "better" [or simply more ubiquitous] comes along in another 15-20 years...

As soon as Windows or UNIX isn't evolving to match current trends then
it'll go the same way - true.

--
http://www.beluga.freeserve.co.uk

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