When the first of three HP communiques on the company's 3000 endgame appeared on Oct. 10, HP stressed that its development team for the 3000 will stop work on the system at year's end. Repairs to emergency, critical problems like the database corruption of 2007 are going to get workarounds at best. The extent of HP's departure will become more obvious in some non-emergency aspects, however.

Craig Fairchild, an HP engineer who's been speaking to the 3000 customer base since Jeff Vance retired from the vendor in 2007, is also taking his role with the community into the sunset, as it were. Fairchild said he's scheduled to be the last 3000 liaison Hewlett-Packard's 3000 group will have, and his duties end Dec. 31.

Some of the reason for that is the 3000 group itself — the veterans with the most tenure inside the vendor's walls — is disbanding at year's end. Fairchild has been a good source of information, working in Vance's stead. The final 3000 liaison told us:

Assuming that I don't get hit by a bus between now and December 31 (in which case a replacement would likely be selected) I may indeed be the last HP e3000 Community Liaison. As [Business Manager] Jennie [Hou] mentioned last week, the lab will be exiting after December 31, 2008, and lab work will cease at that point.

I'm sure that I'll still read the 3000 NewsWire for as long as you want to keep publishing it, though!

Thanks, Craig. We expect to be publishing the NewsWire at least as long as HP will be giving out 3000 migration advice. Which, as you might expect, is the kind of constant vendor information that has no end-date in sight. Many migrations are only announced as of today, with far fewer actually underway.