[Info-vax] HP Integrity rx2800 i4 (2.53GHz/32.0MB) :: PAKs won't load

[clairgrant71 at gmail.com]

On Monday, February 29, 2016 at 10:21:06 AM UTC-5, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
>
>....
>
>   Whether the staff can get enough work done and quickly enough 
> -- and within their minuscule and colossally constrained budget -- to 
> convince enough existing OpenVMS folks to stay and particularly to 
> convince enough new vendors and enough new applications to deploy on 
> OpenVMS?  VSI has to make money, and in a market that's supremely 
> competitive and a market with far larger and better-funded competitors 
> quite literally giving away their products, and -- until and unless the 
> VSI folks can bend the trend -- the OpenVMS customer base is static at 
> best and declining over the longer term.
> 
> VSI is already curing existing messes that my OpenVMS customers have, 
> such as with their Apache 2.4 port.   Now whether they can artfully 
> remediate the inevitable messes in ~forty years of legacy OS code, and 
> sufficient to keep the current customer base happy and to make the 
> product interesting to new users and new deployments?
> 

I don't usually join threads like this but I think Steve's comments are about as spot on as anything could be when it comes to the big picture summary of VSI and our position. For long-term success it will take a lot of support from existing VMS users, good judgment (and guesses) on our part, and a lot of luck as well. Of course, we have mountains of feedback and suggestions but given our limited resources we have to pick our spots very carefully. I'm glad to see the Apache update getting some attention, for example. We need to be doing things that have a noticeable impact on a large set of customers. As I have said since the beginning, there won't be a future without support during the early days. It is still less than a year since we shipped 8.4-1H1 and we are about to finish our testing for 8.4-2 which will be part of HP's New Product Introduction day March 31. Our biggest challenges are rarely technical; we handle those fairly well. The really tough questions involve judging where to spend the resources vs. impact on the business.

Clair