Re: When HP loses to Oracle....

David Froble wrote:

So JF, while you claim to see fleeing customers, I see customers that given half a chance
will be the most loyal HP has.

HP's management are printer and wintel oriented. They don't like this
loyalty to an OS because they are stuck with these products they don't
want. They also see the server market as commodity running either wintel
or linux. And let's face it, there are more applications available on
Linux than on VMS.

Hey, HP won't cause your VMS machine to suddently stop. You can buy the
last IA64 produced and run on it for a decade or two, like people have
done for VAX.

As sales and BCS revenues continue to drop, the cost of continued IA64
development have or will become greater than revenues.

Continued IA64 production of Kittson for a decade is akin to producing
VAXes based on 1992 technology today.

My perspective is, give the customers a chance, such as VMS on x86 and continuing
development,

That would be the nice thing to do as HP terminates IA64. But HP did
have a pilot to test portability to x86 and it stopped it because costs
were too great. What is not sure is whether this was just based on
porting HP-UX or whether each of the OS had its own separate evaluation.

I would think that porting VMS to x86 would be simpler than HP-UX, in
part due to endianness compatibility.

The bean counters at HP look at revenue potential and costs of porting
and say "no way José"


Thing is, whether HP has the people who could actually do the job, is a rather big question.

Hoff could port VMS in a couple of days :-) But without FredK, writung
the video drivers would b tough.


I'd be interested in knowing how hard it would reall be to port the very
early stages of VMS. Since one can get EFI based 8086, wouldn't the
early modules susch as the initial loader and sysboot be much easier to
port than the port from vax to alpha and alpha to ia64 which didn't have
a common boot firmware ?
.

Relevant Pages

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