[Info-vax] New RoadMap out for VMS

[JF Mezei]

The unceremonious dumping of the real VMS engineering and replacement by
newbies was supposed to be transparent to the customer base.

And if HP wanted to make the change transparent, they would have kept
the roadmaps with plenty of mew features planned, perhaps without a
timeline since it is harder to plan delivery dates when your team lacks
experience.

Next year's roadmap could better define the timeline because by then,
VMS management will have a better grasp on the capabilities of their team.

The anorexic roadmap sends the message that HP is not willing to spend
much money in the medium and long term to upgrade VMS in any signifiacnt
way.

Short of a major policy change (Hello Meg Whitman !), it is very
unlikely that the roadmap will regain weight from its current anorexic
state and it will simply become a copy of HP's hardware announcements so
that VMS can run on new IA64 hardware.


Also consider that if HP is already planning the EOL announcement of
Itanium, it is logical that product roadmaps for products that won't be
ported beyond IA64 to essentially stop in the next year or two.


On the other hard, HP might surprise us ad the reason the roadmap is
anorexic is that most of the team is already busy porting to x86.


This is exactly why Meg Whitman has to hurry up to announce what her
vision/strategy is going to be for HP, especially with regards to the
BCS/Itanium ecosystem.


If they were to announce that IA64 was going to be EOLed after Poulson
and that VMS is being ported to x86, then we could all understand
the currently anorexic roadmap.

But without that announcement, the roadmap points to VMS not longer
actively being developped and going into maintenance/support mode.

And this is certaintly true when you consider the Oracle/RDB issues.