All: Duane wrote: [Snip] We recently responded to a competitive joint bid (multiple organizations) where one of the organizations already has an HP 3000 (and I believe an office of HP is located in the general vicinity). Unfortunately, our HP 3000 only solution was downgraded because of just that - it runs on the HP 3000. To paraphrase the site already owning the HP 3000: "We are NOT confident of HP's commitment to the 3000, and in fact feel HP has been sending STRONG messages that they are abandoning MPE in the not too distant future." Ouch. Then Jim Phillips wrote: We have talked and >screamed and cajoled and cried and tried everything short of an LBO and >what have we got to show for it? Some trifles thrown our way to keep >the children quiet. No great commitment to MPE. No great commitment >to Image. Okay, Not that a multi-billion dollar company needs me to come to their aid - but let's not be too hard on HP and their stance on the HP3000. I don't believe that allocating the entire marketing and R&D budgets of HP to the HP3000 could materially change the new system sales of the HP3000 in the general computer server market. The general computing new server market is currently heading towards UNIX and NT. I just can't see a business case for HP that allows them to make a return on investment pushing the HP3000 over Unix or NT for new system sales where customers were not previously biased to the HP3000. But there does appear to be enough of a return to maintain the HP3000 and provide lightweight enhancements to both the OS and TurboImage. And somebody brilliant at HP made sure that MPEiX and HPUX could be hosted on the same box so new technology investment for HP UNIX servers can more cost-effectively be used for MPEiX. So let's look on the bright side. HP has a relatively small, but bright and talented team of engineers working on MPEiX and TurboImage that continues to service the needs of the fiercely loyal installed customer base. But, we are not going to see the next killer OS from this group nor or we going to see TurboImage enhancements that compare to the three main data base vendors who have hundreds of engineers working on new state of the art data warehouse retrievals or network computing initiatives. But hey, who am I to complain that third parties will need to continue to fill in the TurboImage gaps. Once, a few years back, three of the most experienced and loyal 3000ist at DISC sat down and asked several questions to determine if the HP3000 was 'dead' and if we should re-focus our energies from the 3000. We asked questions like the following: 1) What is the annual number of engineers working on MPEiX and TurboImage over the past 10 years? 2) What is annual number of new HP3000 only applications released on MPEiX over the past 10 years? 3) What is annual number of schools using the HP3000 for teaching computer science over the past 10 years? 4) What is the annual number of new HP3000 sold to non-3000 sites over the past 10 years? 5) What is the annual maintenance dollars for HP3000 hardware and software over the past 10 years? 6) What is the percentage of new HP3000 servers compared to all other new servers over the past 10 years? We had several more questions and knew that we couldn't get HP or anyone else to answer but we and I'm sure most of the readers of this list can speculate that the graphs would show a downward trend. So we came to the following conclusions: 1) The HP3000 market for selling new systems to new customers was shrinking and would continue to shrink and there wasn't much that HP or anyone else could do about it. 2) The HP3000 installed base, however would not die for a number of years and the CPU upgrade and additional CPU market would continue to be strong. 3) HP would continue servicing the HP3000 installed base funded by the hardware and software maintenance stream until it falls below a critical mass which will take several more years. I think we came to the same conclusions as the economic and strategic planning groups at HP and with a slightly smaller budget of a couple six-packs. Of course, the HP folks had to look at real data, we just speculated on ours. And they probably couldn't drink beer which certainly sped up our conclusions. So, I hope we don't spend too much time in this list trying to get HP to do some 'feel good' marketing for the sake of HP3000 loyalists. I just don't see it causing an expansion of the HP3000 to new sites. Mind you, I would love to be wrong on this topic. And, Duane, I certainly like to see people share the 3000 successes and failures with this group. I'm sorry your latest one was not a success. Terry O'Brien Dynamic Information Systems Corporation Voice: (303) 444-4000 Email: [log in to unmask]