3000 NewsWire

COBOL still stands in center ring

The most prevalent language on the HP 3000 is among the oldest in computing. But COBOL is still the glue that holds together the world's business computing. A language conceived in the 1960s remains the most often used tool for applications built in the 1980s, tested in the 1990s and carried through Y2K — and still out-executing anything else.

MicroFocus touted this fact this week when the company announced a milestone in its academic adoption program for the language. The firm's Academic ConnecTIONs (ACTION) program has surpassed 50 US academic institution members. The ACTION program focuses on COBOL and core IT skills training and provides member universities with free access to the latest technology and teaching tools for enterprise application development.

Micro Focus never released a version of its language tools for the HP 3000. But the company acquired Acucorp, makers of the AcuCOBOL GT development suite. Acucorp had begun to offer an enhanced COBOL environment for MPE/iX when HP announced its pullout from the HP 3000 marketplace.

No matter. COBOL applications continue to perform in the center ring of the IT circus, even as languages like Java and Ruby steal the sideshow attention. Putting COBOL into schools gives the center-pole of the business tent a chance to prop up careers of IT pros from a new generation. How popular does COBOL remain? Micro Focus reminds us that every day, businesses execute 200 times as many COBOL transaction than Google searches.

Micro Focus is making an effort to put COBOL back onto the curriculum of schools worldwide. Consider that IT skills are in decline across the industry, with far fewer college students choosing any computer career at all, development or otherwise. Computers were once cool in school, back in the days when COBOL didn't hear sneers.

The ACTION program "provides member universities with free access to the latest technology and teaching tools for enterprise application development. This helps connect enterprises with young developers equipped with essential COBOL and related skills."

In a release issued today, Micro Focus quoted the chairman of the Texas A&M University Kingsville Information Systems department:

We recognize that the majority of enterprise systems running today rely on applications written in COBOL,"said Dr. Richard Aukerman. "It is important that we offer our Computer Information Systems students a complete curriculum and focus on all the technologies they will need to work effectively within an enterprise. We continue to see a demand for COBOL-skilled workers, and the Micro Focus ACTION program enables us to provide our students with the skills that will be put to real use when they enter the business world.

Choose Windows, or Unix, or both

Migrating 3000 sites search for serious reasons to adopt a particular new platform. The solutions often revolve around an application, rather than choosing an operating environment. We examine this question often in our community, in part because the operating environment is what always set the HP 3000 apart, distinguished a company's initial enterprise choice.

But for a company that's moving its application, instead of trying to replace it, the environment itself becomes the major deciding point. Customers examine available expertise and existing environments in allied operations. Some of them recall a vendor's end-game when beginning another path toward enterprise excellence.

Windows is the leading choice of migrating sites, while others are picking up on Linux as a foundation for a migrated application. Paul Edwards, who worked for years until just recently on a customer's 3000 migration in the Atlanta area, said costs and history led the customer away from HP's Unix.

"[My customer] and others I know about choose Windows or Linux over HP-UX because of the lower cost of software and hardware, plus the friendly user interface," he said. "There is still a lot of animosity against HP for the way they badly bungled the end of the HP 3000 sales and support. Plus, there are a lot more applications on these platforms to choose from for the SMB HP 3000 user community."

HP won't make you choose between these environments if you have an appetite for a full buffet of operating systems. Putting Windows, Linux and HP-UX to work all at once, in a single server, is no big deal anymore. It's been offered ever since HP rolled out Superdome servers which could host multiple OS instances. By now an Integrity server from HP, a far less costly investment, can host all of these environments at once.

This month HP released version 4.0 of HP Integrity Virtual Machines, software which enables this multiple hosting on HP hardware as affordable as bladed servers. The latest version runs on HP-UX 11i v3, supports eight virtual CPUs, capped CPU allocation (in addition to CPU entitlement as in previous releases), additional support for accelerated virtual IO (AVIO), and a new VM performance analysis tool.

The Red Hat and SUSE flavors of Linux are supported by the latest Virtual Machine, as well as Windows Server 2003. OpenVMS customers are in line for support next year.

IBM also has a solution, in its Series i and Series p servers, which hosts multiple operating environments. Christian Schneider of PIR Group says that the company's new sports social networking application, www.playerreputation.com, "has a Linux partition on our iSeries [using the AS/400 environment], and the Windows server is running on a separate card plugged into the backbone. We didn’t need [IBM's Unix] AIX, but you can have it running in a partition if you want."

Oracle partnered with HP last week to release a "Database Machine" that didn't need any HP Unix to boost speeds up to 10 times faster, according to the unbiased Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. The situation says much about HP and its enterprise solutions. HP strategy does not poke one solution above others for its customers. This is one reason why so many HP 3000 customers are choosing Windows, rather than HP-UX, to replace their in-house applications. HP has always said that apps determine platform choice.

And that is true. But if you make no new choice of app on migration, then it must be the platform itself — and HP's track record of support — which has an effect on choosing Windows over Unix. This also has an effect on the growth of the HP Unix community in the years to come. When your vendor follows the marketplace's desires, it can lead away from vendor-centric solutions like HP-UX.

Linking Up to the Community

The community count is nearing 70 experts and veterans at the Linked In group that covers HP 3000 expertise and background. Some of the members go back to the fundamental days of the MPE/iX environment with their experience, while others are telling members in the free and open group about migration choices.

While Nancy Missildine joined up, she checked in with stories of integrating and testing MPE/XL 20 years ago at HP. Meanwhile Mark Ranft has been reporting on choices being made by his Pro 3k consultancy to move airline transaction processor Navitaire off a farm of more than 30 HP 3000s, carefully and with precision.

Asked why Windows and .NET is a suitable replacement for these MPE/iX operations that serve major airlines, Ranft said that Windows, like MPE or Linux or HP-UX, is "just a tool. The enterprise architect must understand the strengths and the weaknesses of the platform and design the application around them. Sometimes this may mean you have large pools of mid-tier systems/application servers to make up for the lack of resiliency in the operating system. This could be compared to using the RAID concept for disk arrays. However, I fear that most enterprises will find the licenses, care and feeding of the numerous mid-term systems needed is far from being inexpensive. Keep in mind that MPE was never exactly cheap."

Joining Linked In — a social network free of charge and important enough to warrant the Connect user group's participation — is as simple as browsing to its linkedin.com opening page. Once you're signed on, look for the "HP 3000 Community" group on the site and make a quick request to join. Then pose a question to the experts, or share what you've learned by answering those already online.

The group has attracted experts retired from HP like Missildine and Mike Paivinen, the latter having taking HP's early retirement package in 2007 after five years of liaison with the OpenMPE and 3000 advocacy community — and a legacy of MPE/iX engineering. Paivinen asked what we planned to do with the Community.

Frankly, that's up to its members more than me, even if I did create it with the new Groups software on Linked In. But I answered Paivinen by saying I hope the group "is up and running after I found several hundred HP 3000 users, owners and experts on Linked In. There's practically nobody like that in the Connect/Encompass user group. With some luck and prodding, perhaps these 3000 people on Linked In can connect for jobs and advice.

Linked In has a different membership than the HP 3000 newsgroup, for the most part, although what the newsgroup survivors call "The -L" still brims with answered questions about technical challenges. Exploring the membership on a network basis, with connections that can lead to new colleagues, is the advantage of a social networking outlet. I hope to see you linked up to the HP 3000 Community on Linked In.

HP powers new database machine

HP announced a new database solution for enterprise customers yesterday, a product co-created with Oracle called the HP Oracle Database Machine. The product marries a Linux version of Oracle with a rack of HP ProLiant servers, along with HP-branded storage.

Oracle said it announced the product in a keynote before more than 40,000 users at the Oracle OpenWorld conference. The Oracle press release didn't mention the ProLiant by name, calling the servers the HP Oracle Database Server. But both hardware and storage servers are actually eight ProLiant DL180 G5 servers and 14 DL360 servers.

HP's press release on the product, a bundle designed for customers who need "extreme performance data warehouses," touted the Oracle Exadata storage part of the solution, for which HP is the exclusive supplier. HP's language says that the product combo of HP hardware and Oracle will be sold by Oracle, with software support coming from that vendor and hardware installation and supporting coming from HP.

A database machine of another variety was once sold by Hewlett-Packard, although the company never used that term in a product name. The HP 3000 made its breakthrough as the engine driving the IMAGE database beginning in 1976, when the company first grouped IMAGE and the HP 3000 as a package. History was on HP's mind during yesterday's announcement, too. The vendor noted that the ProLiant servers have 15 years of industry service, so long as you count early versions of Compaq products installed at places like General Motors during the 1990s.

HP said of its hardware driving the Oracle Database Machine

The HP ProLiant server was  introduced 15 years ago this month and has been the industry’s leading x86  server brand ever since... Oracle’s new HP Oracle Database Machine is a full 42U rack system that includes eight HP ProLiant DL360 servers running Oracle Database 11g and Oracle Real  Application Clusters on Oracle Enterprise Linux and 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers.

Of special note in this announcement is that neither the HP Itanium-based servers or the HP-UX Unix environment are part of this data warehouse solution. Data warehousing is a commonplace use for large HP 3000 installations, especially those serving the insurance and retail sectors.

The Oracle-HP announcement sparked the echoes of the earlier HP database initiative, powered on the 3000 by HP-only technology. Paul Edwards, the retired OpenMPE director who worked for Hewlett-Packard during that IMAGE breakthrough era, said the package took off because of its tight integration and a rich third party toolset.

HP had a "database machine" with the HP 3000 and IMAGE. The reasons for the success were the close coupling with MPE and the ease of use by users at various levels of technical expertise. There were also good third party tools such as DBGeneral, Adager, and Suprtool that completed the environment and made it very efficient.

Oracle users who have installed large data warehouses up to now will have to consider the value of an upgrade to the new Linux-based solution. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said that "For the first time, customers can get smart performance storage designed for Oracle data warehouses, that is ten times faster.”

The product includes a grid of eight database servers with 64 Intel processor cores running Oracle Enterprise Linux; and a grid of 14 Oracle Exadata Storage Servers that can be configured to access up to 168 terabytes of raw storage with 14 GB/second data bandwidth to the servers. HP said it serves the largest installed base of Oracle customers in the industry. Much of that service is hosted on the ProLiant line, which HP reports has about a 34 percent market share among x86 servers.

Programming Made Easier

Historic facts can expire, their sell-by dates causing what we know to become untrue. Take the history of the HP 3000's advances. In 2000, HP's pledge to take MPE/iX onto the Itanium architecture was already history, since the vendor made the promise several years earlier. Then in late 2001, well, that history became invalid, and to some customers, simply untrue. But some artifacts of history hold facts that remain true no matter what their date, especially if you own or operate a 3000 of any vintage.

Durable truth is hard to come by in the computer industry. So much is paved over every year that knowledge becomes arcane quickly in the name of advances. But consistency is also a value worth preserving, and so a good share of the 3000 community is still using the system HP built, then dropped from its 21st Century sales plans.

That constant use is what makes a recent addition to our archives more than a relic. Today we received a copy of the Using The HP 3000 "an introduction to interactive programming," circa early 1979. (Thanks to Roger Smith, IS Director of Tulare County Office of Education, for the addition; click on any photo here for a larger version.) In that springtime of 1979, the HP 3000 had two means of interactive access: the 2645A terminal and a hardcopy-only cousin, the 2635. But the commands from that MPE III version of the OS still run today, nearly 30 years later.

That's more than historic. It borders on legendary — but it's also why HP had to admit the 3000 business was too big for it to maintain. Too large in time-span, anyway.

HP wrote this book for the "professional computer programmer" as well as "someone who has never seen a computer before. And we know from experience that both categories are well represented in the HP 3000 user base."

To be sure, the last part of that sentence will be viewed as history. You may not be able to find someone who has never seen a computer before. However, it's not that hard to find someone who has never seen a business server before, and that's what kind of computer the HP 3000 remains today.

The manual is fun, and full of reminders of how much easier programming has become in 29 years' time. The sections on how to delete a line or characters within a line make me wonder how anyone had time to compete a project. But then projects deadlines were measured in months instead of weeks for most customers. Plus, completing a project on the first attempt was a genuine measure of success. Still, all that control-X and control-H had to slow down the creative process. Maybe it was like learning to finger the keys before you compose the concerto.

This document had some unfortunate choices of layout, the worst being the use of yellow type to indicate the HP 3000 responses to commands. Like everybody in 1979, HP was learning how to teach its customers about the use of this new tool. Interactive computing was the reason that the HP 3000 took off in an era dominated by IBM mainframes, and HP probably wanted to show how lively the interactive experience could appear. Later on, you could actually see yellow letters in HP responses, on certain types of terminals.

Each year from 1979 to the present, HP has worked to ensure the largest number of HP 3000s could run the programs crafted with the help of this manual and successors. That makes the 3000-using universe unparalleled among any computer launched in the 1970s. Rogers said that the software written in the 1980s ran during this century.

When I started here 1985 we had a Series III and a Series 44. We then upgraded the 44 to a 48 and changed the III to a Series 70. The next step was changing both to a 960. The last one we got was the 969KS/200.

We still had software we wrote on the Series III that was still running on the 969.  Amazing.

When it adopted a go-go grow business mantra in the 21st Century, HP couldn't find the motivation to keep up anymore with its 3000 legend. Perhaps a dedicated base of users, full of expertise and experience, can carry on into a fresh decade of the 21st, starting in 2010. Whether it's a manual for an HP storage device, or a programming aid written before Ronald Reagan took office, nothing seems to expire altogether in your community. How many others can claim that kind of history?

How many 3000s, how long: why care?

I have answered one question over and over during the 24 years I've covered the HP 3000 marketplace: How many HP 3000s are out there? The answer has varied from decade to decade, but the query has also changed, too. The tone of the question has gone from proud (the 80s) to curious (the 90s), to dismissive (2002-2004) and more recently, hopeful.

David Evans Jr., Chief Systems Security Officer at the San Bernadino schools' Superintendent's Office, asked the question again last week, and with good reason from a 3000 shop making its migration. I answered,

Steve Cooper of Allegro, who's been in the biz forever, said at this summer's Computer History Museum symposium that he thought a minimum of 10,000 systems are now in use, perhaps up to 20,000. At its peak, the installed base was at least 100,000 — that point being before Windows had released a truly-working version.

I agree with both of his numbers and defer to his perspective, since I've only been in the market since 1984. Steve pre-dates me by 10 years.

Evans was researching the question to get data on the support viability of the HP 3000 in the years beyond 2010. HP's already said it will shut down its lab operations in 14 weeks from now. Evans explained

We know HP has posted the December, 2010 date. [Our organization] doesn’t think our migration from the HP3000 to a .NET application is going to be done by then. Our application is a home grown financial/HR and there really is no off the shelf solution that will work for a County Office of Education’s needs. Off the shelf would get us maybe 70 percent, and we’d still have to write the other 30 and make it integrate. Plus the cost factor.

So my boss was asking how many HP 3000s are still in use. Ideal is our hardware support vendor and they are saying they can support our hardware until 2015. I would think that their source of replacement parts is going to be surplus HP3000s. So how many more are their left, and at what rate will they be consumed, is the concern. And I would think the other HP 3000 support vendors, are scouring the landscape to find HP 3000s to acquire for their needs.

Shops like the ones where Evans works are commonplace, not rare holdovers. Much of this 3000 community has in-house apps doing the work of IT, and moving to off the shelf is a disappointing choice for a migration shop. Moving an app takes time to do it right, whether it's a Windows migration like the one at the San Bernadino schools or a Unix target. The HP 3000 will hold its value for these companies even as they invest in the tools and expertise to leave the platform.

At this point there's no clue about whether HP's 2010 exit deadline will be moved. But if shops like this California customer are still out there, it's easy to predict that HP will continue to write contracts which are very private in nature. These same circumstances — keeping customers mum with Confidential Disclosure Agreements while extending support beyond deadlines — were used by HP during 2005.

What a day to buy stock

Amid the muck of today's financial meltdown on Wall Street, Hewlett-Packard reached into its pockets to inject more confidence into its share prices. The company said it will spend an extra $8 billion on share repurchasing, a tactic that ensures a stock cannot go into free fall in conditions like those of the past seven days.

HP's flex of its financial muscle is a modest one, but a continuation of an earlier pledge to buy up itself. The figure pales compared to the Microsoft announcement of today: The maker of Windows and Jerry Seinfeld-Bill Gates commercials said it will repurchase $40 billion in stock. That Microsoft buyback, just like the one from HP (and Nike) will come in the form of cash, not borrowing. You can't do that unless you're earning healthy profits.

Not all of the US economy is in tatters, despite what trouble is being trumpeted today. HP and Microsoft and Nike still run operations which supply product that the world still demands, product which can't be easily swapped in some shadowy back-door schemes like debt paper or mortgage hedges.

Of course, the HP-Microsoft $48 billion would hardly even finance the interest on the $700 billion blank check the US Treasurer Henry Paulson demanded over the weekend. And that demand is borrowing, not a cash buyback. A Wall Street Journal article on today's buybacks called the moves "A Display of Strength." HP just wants to ensure its market capitalization won't take a pounding while the howling of the public and demands from Congress ensue over that blank check.

HP's stock dropped about two percent today in a rough and tumble trading session on the New York Stock Exchange. The company had already pledged to buy back $8 billion before this week, but had spent through only $1.6 billion of that as of July 30, the last quarterly report deadline. More than 22 million HP shares were traded today. As a point of reference, stock of the biggest savings and loan company in the US Washington Mutual traded more than 158 million shares — all bought or sold for under $4 a share.

Microsoft put another brace under its stock, raising the dividend to 13 cents per share. The company pledged to spend as much in stock buybacks as it was ready to spend on purchasing Yahoo. These companies can weather the hard times from their insides, having followed no Fantasy Island junket to impossible blue-sky futures. The rest of the world's sales — not just those from the US economy — will deliver the outside weather for HP and other tech giants to button up against.

Managing US easier than HP?

If you're feeling a little disconnected from the US Presidential campaign, good news: A former HP CEO has made it more interesting for you, the HP 3000 customer who has seen their system sent to the exits by that very same CEO's management.

Of course, we're talking about Carly Fiorina, the only woman on earth who can be called a former CEO of HP. Naturally enough, her name surfaced during her campaigning for Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin. In what may first look like a joke at Palin's expense, the TV network Current TV said in its comedy show Campaign Update that Fiorina stepped out to claim nobody running for either party is sharp enough to run HP. Because it's so hard, she explained.

The layoff — oops, restructuring — of about 25,000 employees won't make running Hewlett-Packard any easier in the near term, now that EDS is a part of HP. But the acquisition of a $44 billion company fulfills one of Fiorina's dreams: To become a services provider on par with IBM, or better. Although she couldn't get the HP board to swallow up PriceWaterhouseCooper, her successor served up EDS instead. Like a Lance Armstrong of the Fortune 50, though, Fiorina isn't riding off into the sunset, instead popping up on TVs and comedy routines this week. Have a look at the last 45 seconds of the network's latest "Campaign Update" to watch a lighter look at the high-flying CEO's latest.

Fiorina was never appreciated for her candor while HP's CEO, and her comment put her in the McCain doghouse. She was booked for several TV interviews over the next few days, including one on CNN. Those interviews have been canceled.

Fiorina's legacy is being carried out by a corporate chief more similar to the rest of HP's CEOs: white male, up from the boardroom of a computer maker. And if you survey HP CEOs before Fiorina and the current Mark Hurd, you will find they have another common element: All were engineers with an affinity for technology. Not your Fiorina trademark, which might have contributed to the 3000 landing on the exit list for the company during the last major acquisition.

When HP's directors fired Fiorina less than four years later in 2005, the author of Perfect Enough, biographer George Anders, said HP might have been better served with a chief in 2001 who understood technology. From a Washington Post article:

 I think of her as a bull-market manager . . . someone who was very good at expanding the business in boom times, but who didn't really have good instincts for efficiency in tough times. When she'd cut, it was with lunges that didn't satisfy either the workforce or Wall Street.

And HP is in some very technologically complex businesses. I think a top executive at such a company needs a deep understanding of the tech to be effective.

It's easy to disagree with Anders, if the goal is to shed computer creations (such as MPE and Alpha) while getting more airtime for the chief executive. Young, meanwhile, left HP to sit as a director on seven corporate boards: Novell (vice-chair), Affymetrix, Chevron Corporation, International Integration, Inc., Lucent Technology, Smith Kline Beecham plc, and Wells Fargo & Co.

You might argue that no leader of a corporation of more than $100 billion would steward something like the 3000, an integrated enterprise solution with a specialized operating environment. And you'd win that argument, so long as nobody in the room could spell I-B-M. Why this matters to the HP 3000 customer, or soon-to-be former customer: Hewlett-Packard is making its biggest push to be a services company selling computer solutions, instead of the other way around. It's up to the customers to decide if they should vote their dollars for that leadership during 2009.

 

 

How 45 grand can create HP rogues

HP 3000 owners want to honor license agreements, but the current state of the 3000 community can make pirates of anyone with a corporate mandate to keep relying on the system. For some customers, HP's two-year-old upgrade pricing on beefing up 3000 systems — the Right To Use license fees — might be a roadblock, something to encourage off-the-books modifications to HP 3000s.

That RTU cost is an unfortunate fact of life for a 3000 customer who cannot afford to migrate, either today or anytime soon. But there's even more cost, also in the realm of usury, which a 3000 homesteader must weather — or navigate around. Creating a licensed new system as a hot spare in a disaster recovery site, complete with third party licenses to match a production box, will trigger a license fee from Cognos (for PowerHouse). The Cognos cost can be as high as $45,000 for a low-end 9x7 server.

That's the opening bid from Cognos, anyway. There's been a court of corporate appeal, as it were, inside the Cognos (now IBM) management. Charlie Maloney has taken ownership of these kinds of negotiations, sometimes injecting a dose of reality into a vendor price list that seems frozen in 1999. But if there's 45 grand in the way of a hot spare, customers who lose in the court of appeal will do their jobs to keep a 3000 always available. That's the fork in the road where a customer enters rogue status, duplicating HP model strings to enable their spare system to be a hot, plug-and-go 3000.

More than two years ago the 3000 community first heard about a program to enable this kind of 3000 modification. We say modification because that's how HP describes the process and its policy, as in "a customer cannot modify any information in HP 3000 stable storage. That's only HP's job."

Nevertheless, the 3000 is not a magic box which can keep changing its technology. The ss_update program inside PA-RISC servers of recent vintage is now in change of such changes, and earlier this year Steve Pirie and his partners opened up business to enable such modifications for support emergencies where HP doesn't support the 3000.

The magic codes inside of ss_update may or may not have changed. We don't find it easy to discover this kind of information, but back in 2006 we heard of examples which we documented once they were offered as proof. Earlier this year, we got an update on the gateway to this kind of process. We don't condone violating a license agreement. On the other hand, as a journalist I just report what I see and hear. This kind of thing has got to be expected in a market where the vendor is heading for the door in a hurry, and the third parties still want to cash in on customers struggling to keep computers online.

People can make judgment and adhere to their principles in situations like this, if they have the room in budget and understanding from their management. Obviously, HP has a solution: abandon the homestead notion and invest in a new HP system (a task not accomplished overnight, or even in a year for most 3000 owners.) However, some companies face $45,000 of new expenses for a system which they can purchase at eBay this month for $2,000. An injection of common sense pricing into the 3000 marketplace, from both system and some software vendors, could reduce a need to turn onto the road of rogues.

HP returns to the OS business?

A pair of reports in the IT blogosphere talk about Hewlett-Packard returning to the operating environment creation workbench. InfoWorld has a report which comments on a BusinessWeek article, both outlining an HP project to build a desktop OS which doesn't require Windows.

Linux will form the core of this HP project, which the vendor has dismissed as being a minor effort. For sure, HP sells millions of units of laptops, and fewer desktops, all shipping with Windows Vista, or downgraded to Windows XP. The HP project won't change much of the percentages. But it might point the way to a future strategy.

The BusinessWeek story suggests the HP effort is based upon the failure of Vista and Windows receding mindshare. Descriptions like "bloated" crop up in the article about Vista and Windows. It recalls the talk about NT's enterprise unreliability while HP was pushing HP-UX back in the 1990s. Hewlett-Packard got the Windows religion long after its rivals Compaq, Dell and IBM. Creating an environment of its own for desktops, based on universal services from Linux, almost recalls the Hewlett-Packard which built and fortified an OS like MPE/iX.

One HP 3000 veteran in the vendor community said HP's efforts would be better spent on porting HP-UX to an industry-standard architecture. Duane Percox of QSS, which is using both HP-UX and Linux in its migration strategies, said, "I would be more interested to hear them quietly assembling a group of engineers to get HP-UX to run on the Intel/AMD true commodity server CPU (Xeon/Opteron) and finally admit itanium is a bust."

For years now, HP has said that HP-UX is the enterprise environment it will continue to bolster with its own development. (And if a customer asks about OpenVMS, HP will add, 'Oh yeah. That one, too.') But the new project seems to say that Windows' current state of the art leaves something to be desired in the enterprise IT environment.

Shortcomings in Windows as an enterprise desktop choice may come as unwelcome messages to HP 3000 sites who are migrating — mainly because the majority of migrating sites are moving their 3000 apps to Windows-based environments. If HP wants to build an end-run around Windows, no matter how modest the project, what confidence does that generate for the Microsoft OS as a migration target?

Microsoft is reported to be making a quick push to get a Windows version 7 into the market by the middle of next year. Even through talk abouit the release is that it won't change enough to change the opinions about Vista, a Windows 7 in 2009 would emerge only about 2.5 years after Vista popped out of the development canal up in Redmond.

Given what HP is investing in services these days (see the EDS deal and its 44,000 employees), it's hard to imagine Hewlett-Packard making OS creation a key offering once more. The days of needing to build an MPE or an HP-UX are gone now. Google has even made its Chrome browser a neutral environment, another assault on the OS-on-hardware model of HP-UX and MPE.