Mike,
Late last year, in a real fit, Lew Platt complained that "Sun
characterizes our company as being one that can't walk and chew
gum at the same time. Well that's just not true. We are going
to put more effort into our Unix operating systems of the
future and continue to be competitive in the workstation market."
(that was a paraphrase of what he said).
Ever since HP made a commitment to work with Gates, their business
has gone downhill & HPUX has suffered. Right now, they're in a
tough position: losing to SUNW in the Unix market & getting
gouged by MSFT & price competition in the PC market, not to
mention 20% of their revenue comes from Asia. I think Lew is going
to be on the way out, soon, if HP's numbers don't improve soon.
They really don't have a good direction & lack innovation in the
computer market.
Merced is a good case in point. They co-developed the chip with
INTC, but couldn't get HPUX to work on it. They just stumbled
through a 64-bit version of HPUX (non-Merced) last year and have
just announced that they will port NT to Merced before they will
port HPUX to Merced. Another is Java: they announce a non-compiant
Java for embedded systems then, when SUNW reminds them of possible
copyright violations, they back-peddle and announce that they want
to work together with SUNW on it.
NT is a loser for HP, they should drop it & improve HPUX to make it
more competitive. They're not going to make money selling PC's &
NT is a hunk of junk that they have to license from the Redmond
Bandits.
cheers,
cherylw
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