milburn@me10.lbl.gov (John Milburn) (01/16/90)
In article <646@mmlai.UUCP> burzio@mmlai.UUCP (Tony Burzio) writes: >Gak! Maintenance contracts! HP does these as well as other computer >vendors, which is to say terrible. They should have a SINGLE contact The new structure of the software contracts is not any cleaner, as far as the paperwork goes, but we did manage to save a few k$, with more items covered than before. The contract structure is finally taking into account the economies to HP of large sites with significant in house expertise. Way to go! >My sales rep has enough to do explaining my postings to his manangement. :-) Be glad you have a sales rep capable of reading netnews. I'm not sure ours can even deal with mail. -jem John Milburn - Advanced Light Source - Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory INTERNET: JEMilburn@lbl.gov BITNET: JEMilburn@LBL.bitnet UUCP: {...}!ucbvax!lbl.gov!JEMilburn SnailMail: 1 Cyclotron Road 46-161 Berkeley, Ca. 94720 Ph: (415) 486-6969
kaf@hpfcdq.HP.COM (Keith Fish) (01/17/90)
>In article <225@cmic.UUCP>, garvey@cmic.UUCP (Joe Garvey) writes: >> Sun will loan you a development >> system... HP (usually, in my experience) seems to want the 3rd party vendors >> to by (at retail) a development system. So Sun generates a larger volume >> (and more sales $$) while customers suffer with limited choices of software. > This seems to be a common thread when 3rd party software support for HP is > not up to snuff. Before you purchase softare for HP (or any other vendor) > you should first ask if they have your machine on site. If they do not, you > probably should go with another vendor, since any port will have lots of > bugs and you won't get good customer help on these problems. Another > problem is when vendors support multiple platforms. If your platform is > near last in line for new version ports, you should begin to wonder. I know this is going to sound biased but it's not intended to be ... What I had always heard/understood was that Sun always LET their 3rd party vendors buy/lease Sun systems since the 3rd party vendor had no choice -- Sun was viewed as the leading unix-like workstation seller in the market so Sun had no reason to loan anybody anything and the 3rd party vendors knew that, too. HP, on the other hand, was not perceived as the "leader" so they always had to work their butts off to show that their systems were good and usually (depending on the 3rd party) had to give out loaner systems. Now that HP has been getting some acknowledgement that they are really a unix-like workstation vendor, Sun may be doing more in the way of loaning equipment for competitive reasons. If both Sun and HP loaned out all their equipment to every 3rd party in the world AND supported those 3rd parties doing porting/development, they wouldn't have many resources left to generate new/better products for paying customers (==> bankrupt). It's hard to correctly prioritize what can be done, and it's even harder to make changes to these changing priorities happen instanenously. > Vendors listed in the HP 3rd party software catalog should be checked to be > sure they have a machine on site... Do you also recommend that a 3rd party have all configurations of all workstations (not just HP) that the 3rd party offers it's software on, or are you singling HP out ? > ********************************************************************* > Tony Burzio * To survive is not enough. > Martin Marietta Labs * > mmlai!burzio@uunet.uu.net * > ********************************************************************* ... strictly my understanding and not that of the company I work for. Keith Fish
kaf@hpfcdq.HP.COM (Keith Fish) (01/18/90)
> / hpfcdq:comp.sys.hp/kaf@hpfcdq.HP.COM (Keith Fish)/9:58 am Jan 16, 1990 /
The last response here (of mine) was directed to a different note originally
-- "HP 3rd Party Software attitude" -- just in case you were trying
to decipher the note header to figure this out.