[Info-vax] Whither VMS?

[JF Mezei]

Michael Kraemer wrote:

> Unlikely, I'd say. They just got rid of their own CPU business
> and one of their Unix platforms,
> why would they reenter that business?

Anti trust. Governments might not agree to Oracle giving Sun's leftovers
 for HP to just kill them. The industry would have gone from a wealth of
different architectures to only IBM Power and Intel/AMDs 8086. And since
Power is essentially proprietary in the enterprise server business, the
governments might rule that disapearance of Sparc would cause too much
concentration on the 8086.

Secondly, HP will have been burned by the failure of IA64 to take off,
while seeing IBM able maintain technological edge with its Power.

Perhaps HP might decide that it needs to get back into the chip business
to be able to control its own future and compete against IBM.

If it hadn't been for the Oracle takeover of Sun, I don't think that HP
would have even thought about restarting chip development. Their goal
would have been to move to 8086 once IA64 reaches its end. But with Sun
essentially going out of business (or so it appears), HP might need to
to reconsider many aspects of its long term plans.

HP neds to be careful. If it is drunken with the thought of growing
support revenues by buying Sun, it may not realise the impact of getting
Solaris and Sparc machines with it.

What bugs me in all that is why would Ellison buy Sun just to get Java
and mySQL and sell the rest ? Ellison seems like he is able to
strategise intelligently and be above hype.

And from HP's point of view, it would depend on how Hurd views Carly's
decision to buy Compaq and whether it was all worth it at the end,
considering that they didn't leverage much out of it (except DEC's disk
storage products). If Hurd doesn't think highly of the decision to buy
Compaq, he might not think highly of a plan to buy Sun.