>>What a company spends time/money on shows its true interest.
>>They spent engineering time to create a low cost conversion
>>of an mpe box to a unix box with just a board swap/nameplate
>>kit. Looks like they care more about unix than mpe.
 
 
Companies are no more immune to marketing hype than the average
consumer.  My own opinion is that the interest in unix is well
warrented by any computer manufacturer that intends to be in the
business five years from now.  Whether unix is the best choice
for a given situation is moot, it is the stuff that sells that
keeps the factories rolling and companies solvent.
 
Having said that I also feel that HP has continually bungled the
marketing effort (or non effort) with respect to the HP3000
family.  Let me tell you a little story:
 
About four years ago our firm decided that the time had finaly
come to bid adeiu to our stalwart 42.  We sent out RFQ's to
COGNOS, HP, BRADMARK, a few other third party suppliers and a
couple of DOS/NOVELL type vendors, just for comparison.
 
The prices that we were quoted by COGNOS and HP were such that I
was tasked with seriously investigating the DOS/NOVELL R-4000
alternative (we were looking at an upgrade cost of close to
$200K based on HP and COGNOS alone).
 
A prominent local vendor of such systems was invited to display
his wares in operation at our site.  He arrived on a Thursday
morning with a van full of equipment and proceeded to install a
miniture network in one of our spare offices.  Nothing fancy,
just three WS with a 386 or 486 server, I can't remember which.
It had some sort of Bitrieve based accounting package on it and
looked very nice and ran pretty well too.
 
Anyway everything was going just swimmingly until I went over
and pulled the power cord to the server out of the wall.
KerThunk!!! To make a long story short the server could not be
cajoled into getting the application suite up again in the time
we had reamining (the rest of the morning and all afternoon).
Files had to be recovered and all sorts of nasty stuff dealt
with.  Not a pretty sight.
 
The representative, who happened to be a principal in the firm
was nearly beside himself with anger but showed remarkable
restraint.  When forcefully questioned as to why I did what I
did I simply asked him to follow me.  I took him and our
company's principal to our computer area, went behind the series
42 and pulled the plug.
 
This was our only computer and everyone at our three branches
was on-line at the time doing their normal work.  I waited three
minutes and plugged her back in.
 
All of the sessions came back to where they had been before, no
data was lost, and some people who had been busy on the phone or
called away from their desks momentarily were unaware that the
system had been down at all.
 
We are still an HP3000 shop!  It might be a used 935 but it is
an HP3000, and yes the above test works just as well on it as it
ever did on the 42.
 
Now, I don't say that I am a marketing marvell.  But it seems to
me that a computer that comes from the factory with this sort of
reliance built in just might have a significant impact on the
decision makers in a company.  The guys at the top of successful
firms are not dolts, they know that there is considerably more
to deciding on a supplier than just price.  But they aren't
technical wizards either.  They could care less about unix,
uNix, Aix, MPE/iX, relational, hierarchical or flat file.  They
jsut want to know that when the stuff goes in you can get it out
again no matter what.
 
Of course they are influenced by what they hear and read, but
one good kick in the teeth like the demo above tends to set all
of the hype in perspective.  They want their systems up and
running, and they don't want to invest as much capital again as
the system itself in UPS and the rest.  Nor do they want to know
why it is going to take 2 or 3 hours before this database or
that file system will be recovered from a momentary power
outage.  They want their companies working and producing, not
idle waiting on a machine.
 
Sometimes all you need to do is to show people how things are,
not how they are imagined to be.  Most people tend to go with
proven and unbreakable over new and improved.
 
Jim
--
James B. Byrne                 mailto:[log in to unmask]
Harte & Lyne Limited           http://www.harte-lyne.ca
Hamilton, Ontario              905-561-1241