[Info-vax] Current VMS Usage Survey

[JF Mezei]

On 13-12-04 13:30, Bill Gunshannon wrote:

> 4000 customers in an industry with probably more than 400,000,000
> customers?  Insignificant.  It is even insignificant if you only
> looked at the US.

NSK has always had fewer customers than VMS. And yet, those fewer
customers managed to convince HP to port to x86 instead of announcing EOL.

If the CEO of NASDAQ tells Meg Whitman that if she forces him to migrate
from NSK, then whenever NASDAQ has a computer glitch, it will blame it
on the fact that HP abandonned the serious computers needed to run
mission critical companies.

NSK happens to be used by high profile customers who have the ability to
hurt HP's image.

VMS customers tend to be low key quiet customers who don't want the
world to know they run VMS.

So when the rug is pulled from under VMS, nobody with any significant
media contacts complains and HP's image is not hurt.



> Not sure what a "free analyst" is but unless your paying him to say
> it none is likely to write anything good about VMS.  Analysts don't
> follow the rants of people out of touch with reality, they follow
> real trends in business.

Until HP annouced the VMS roadmap no longer included new versions and no
longer included a patch to run on Poulson, there was no actionable
evidence HP was pulling the plug on VMS.

When HP massacred VMS engineering, it first tried to hide this, but
eventually relented and allowed one web cast to explain the situation
and promised that VMS development was going on like before and that
customers should see no change.

It all has to do with trends and observations over time. None of those
provided hard evidence that could convince a reporter to write about it.

And even the current announcement from HP shys away from making a formal
EOL announcement. It is all there, end of availability fo Tukwila in
2015, no new versions of VMS, but it also says there will be new patches
issued, and leaves door open for reconsideration.

If HP is to change its mind about VMS at this point, it won't be up to
users, it would be up to a few key customers going to Whitman directly.

One of the problems with VMS was its isolation. Complaints through
normal channels would never leave the "safe" enclave of VMS/BCS and
never go higher than the BCS manager. That is why you need customers
with an activist CEO capable of bypassing all the "filtration" within HP
ranks and talk direcly to the CEO.