[Info-vax] Maybe a bit OT, maybe not.. in any case an interesting article

[David Froble]

JF Mezei wrote:
> Keith Parris wrote:
> 
>> What we know for certain at this point is that Intel has committed to 
>> multiple generations of Itanium, including Poulson, Kittson, and 
>> something called Kittson+.
> 
> No, we know that HP is willing to pay intel to keep IA64 on life support
> and slow paced development.
> 
> HP was under the illusion that it could hide the truth from customers
> and pretend all was well with IA64. That has turned against them and
> IA64 sales are tanking.
> 
> It would be logical for HP at this point to fess up about its plans to
> drop HPUX, VMS and IA64 (and announce its intentions for NSK).
> Continuing to pretend IA64 is safe and being actively developped reduces
> HP's credibility greatly.
> 
> Whitman seems to be more pragmatic and if BCS loses too much money
> beause of tanking IA64 sales, it would be in HP's best interests to
> initiate the transition to 8086/Linux/Windows sooner rather than to try
> to artificially stretch IA64's remain life.
> 
> Any transition costs a company customers. But if you start now, you
> start off with a larger customer base. If you delay the transition, you
> allow more and more customers to leave you so when you start the
> tranistion, you start off with a smaller base of remaining customers.

Ah, so you're saying that HP should abandon a large chunk of it's customers?

Customers who may have a huge investment in their applications, which just might not be 
portable.

And you imply that those customers will stick with HP on windoz or linux?  Well, I've seen 
a lot of stupid people, so, perhaps some might.  But if such was done to me, I sure 
wouldn't stick with such a vendor.

Would you?

And perhaps you do have portable, or somewhat, applications.  Would you make the perhaps 
non trivial effort to port them ... to a vendor who appears to be sinking on the good ship 
itanic?  Or would you perhaps see that IBM has been doing well, and choose a more secure 
vendor?

Not everybody is interested in making a large investment in their applications every 
couple of years.

Might I suggest that if HP is going to make an economic turn around, it will be with their 
current customers, and that they will need to keep such customers satisfied ....