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The world’s economic, social and environmental problems are so
extensive that challenges will undoubtedly remain for the foreseeable
future.

HP’s objective is to continually increase our positive impact
through our global citizenship work, while responding to changing needs
and seeking areas where our investment is most effective. We are
focused on three challenges for the coming three to five years:
addressing electronic waste, raising standards in HP’s global supply
chain and increasing access to information technology.

These are
critical issues facing our industry, and we are committed to making a
positive contribution. Although we are pleased with progress to date,
much remains to be done.


 

Indeed *MUCH* remains to be done:

1. Market OpenVMS

VMS is one of HP’s highest margin products, yet among the Windows
generation it’s practically unknown or considered dead and buried, and
long-time VMS veterans like myself are literally *SCREAMING* to have it
be marketed against (the software that still makes almost daily
headlines for security issues – I don’t actually have to name it, do
I?). Even one of the biggest VMS VARs in the healthcare field tells its
customers that it’s moving its middleware to Wintel (is that HIPAA
compliant?) and leaving only the back-end on VMS/Oracle.

misc.invest.stocks was one of the groups in another cross posting, so
I’ll express that I’m surprised that to date, neither Compaq nor HP were
ever called to account for such poor fiduciary stewardship as leaving
this virtual gold mine of product to rot in ignominity and anonymity.

After all the remarks about “de-facto standard” systems (the
unenlightened call them “industry standard”, but no recognized standards
group considers them as such), and market dominance and …, I’ve yet to
hear a valid explanation for not marketing OpenVMS vigorously and highly
visibly in the mainstream trade media.

2. OpenVMS-x86

A mentor of mine holds that “you can make money or you can make excuses,
but you can’t make both”. To date, when asked why 32-bit OpenVMS was
never successfully ported to IA32 I usually get a lot of rote blather
about the CPU architecture. Didn’t seem to stand in Itanic’s way. Even
Alpha had PALcode.

Two questions:
A. What is the total dollar value of the IA32 software market (operating
systems)?
B. What is OpenVMS’s share of that market?

Need I say more?

3. OpenVMS-x86/64

Much noise is made on comp.os.vms about every major vendor that gave up
on IA64, especially when Dell entered and then backed out of that market
for the second time.

It becomes obvious that IA64 will *NEVER* be a de-facto standard
platform (the unenlightened call them “industry standard”). x86-64 is
likely the only true way to ensure OpenVMS’s future. *THAT* is where the
industry is going. *THAT* is where OpenVMS needs to be.

HP needs to stop making excuses and get busy positioning itself and its
products to make *BIG* money.

Let’s see… Did I mention advertising OpenVMS in the mainstream trade
media? Yes, I did.

 


 

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