[Info-vax] 2009 VMS Bootcamp notice

[JF Mezei]

DaveG wrote:

> I wonder about the cancellation in terms of predicted attendance and/
> or economic conditions.  AFAIK, they filled the house for all past
> bootcamps. 

Anyone who has listened to the media will know that the economic
situation in the USA (and UK for that matter) is not very good.

There are probably two sides to this: HP cutting costs, and customers
cutting costs by reducing travel/conference expenses.

I do not know if Bootcamp was revenu neutral for HP or if it consumed
much in terms of HP budgets/human resources.

If HP expects this to be revenu neutral (or has a cap on how much it
wants to spend on it), then there would be concerns about  a minumum
number of attendants required to reach break-even point.

If HP had wanted, I am sure they could have found a way to make it work,
even with reduced attendance (scale it down a bit, but give more
intimate contact between customers and engineers).

HP could have pitched something like "in these hard economic times, you
can save a lot of money by leveraging the most our of your legacy
systems, so come to Bootcamp and learn what you can do with VMS" type of
stuff.

It would have been nice to have seen some mention of HP committed to
bringing bootcamp back once economic activity resumes.

The last HP financials were good. (but mostly ignored by the media who
are focused on finding only bad economic news). But I suspect that HP
will get hit with bad news next quarter.

My main concern is HP announcing on June 25 that 8.4 will be the last
VMS release and that from then on, HP wudl release only bug fixes and
patches to make VMS work on new IA64 machines as long as new IA64
machines are made.