I would think it is because SUN is taking too much marketshare from them unless it is general server market slowdown.
In a word, Eric, YES, it's because of the former. SUNW
is poised to hammer HWP into the wall on large-scale
corporate servers and internet servers.
I can tell you from personal experience @HWP in the O/S
group, HPUX, 32 or 64-bit, is not a horrible O/S, but it just isn't Solaris.
HWP is a fine company, but their engineering culture is
older than that of Sun by about 1 generation. They know
how to manage projects, but their ideas about the
computer business and what customer require these days
go back about 10-15 years. It's not like they don't
try, but they have a big company with a big bureaucracy
and a substantial tie-back to the legacy systems that
had been sold 10-20 years ago. They tried to rejuvenate
the company with their decision (a flawed decision) to
re-market NT on their own PC's. Lew Platt lost his job
because of it. Now they are trying to pick up the Unix
pieces and catchup w/SUNW at the same time: a daunting
task.
To make a long story short, SUNW is leaving them in the
dust, especially with e-commerce and large-scale IT
servers. HWP just doesn't have a good answer for the
E-10K & Solaris-7. I could go on and on about it, but
I don't think the market sees the HWP problem necessarily
a problem for Sun. They USED to lump the Unix vendors
together, that is until Oct. 1998, when the internet
boom began. |
