[Info-vax] 2009 VMS Bootcamp notice

[DaveG]

On Jan 8, 5:48 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> 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.

Your last paragraph mentions that 8.4 is the last release for
OpenVMS.  I try to keep up with things and I don't recall reading or
hearing that news.  Could you post a link/official doc/whatever to
verify.