I sent this to Martin "the Journalist" Under the subject of What if ... What if Carly learned about conglomerates from Jack Welch (GE - Just retired) ... she could hire Jack to help her understand how you can sell Jet Engines and rrefrigerators and kitchen appliances all from the same company ... then you might get a different viewpoint ... You have a niche market with Printers and consumer PCs server by one channel. You have a value added channel for the high end non-stop computing market (Himalayas); another one for the scientific (VAX/Alpha), another for business computing (HPe3000) with specific expertise in mid-range manufacturing, catalogue fulfillment software etc. You have a market for departmental/SME servers NT boxes with JBOD (just a bunch of Disk) You have a market for high end disk raid/SANs for all of the above (common components/sub-systems) You can sell services to provide customer solutions where if the $ > N HP Service takes the deal or if less they contract it to qualified partners with HP as prime. You can provide financing for any/all of the above though your in-house financing group [Jack made a ton of money with GE credit] You could show some concern for partners and help them to be successful and grow to the extent they are willing to ... long run partners are to valued as they can help tell your story to the world. You have a chance to use the HP brand across all of the above and provide quality products and charge for quality hotline support and service for dealers, consumers, and business partners ... What if Carly actually "got it" and stopped looking for a commodity market with services as the differentiator - but thought of customers as partners and business that assist in the solution process as partners too? And while we are at it an eco system that includes a great independant users group. Hope this makes you all think ... Birket PS Don't let Martin know about http://www.techgroupmd.com/mpeusers.htm or he would start speculating on how the migration to the HPe3000 and its growth might cause HP to be in a monopoly position for commercial servers ;-) Birket Foster M. B. Foster Associates .. the 1-800-ANSWERS people! Supplying DataExpress w/cross-platform ODBCLink Option ( 3000,9000&NT) EC/EDI(3000,9000,NT) Phone (613) 448-2333 or (613) 448-2588 (FAX) (See our website at http://WWW.MBFoster.com ) * To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, * * etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *