chen@digital.sps.mot.com (Jinfu Chen) (06/22/91)
Consider following scenario: A vendor X just announces an earth-breaking software Y that will make you live longer. You are obviously impressed and ask vendor X if software Y runs on your HP/Apollo machine. The salesman said "Of course our software runs on __HP__ machines". But what he really meant is HP-UX. When pressed further when are they going to port software Y to Apollo, the usual answer is "we'll do it if there is enough demand." I'm sure many of you already experience this in the last few years with third party software vendors. However, the above scenario actually took place in an HP booth in 1991 DAC in San Francisco last week, and the product Y's name is Softbench C++. The person who demo'ed the product was nice enough to tell me the name of a person in Chemsford I can call in order to let HP know we __need__ the product running in Domain/OS. Going around the HP booth, I found the same answer for the Shared X product. This time the demo person even didn't believe Shared X can be ported to Domain/OS because of lack of X window environment in Domain/OS (he's half true I have to say). To add a few more example, HP-VUE 2.0 is available on HP-UX long before Domain/OS (I'm even skeptical 2.0 will be available at all on Domain/OS). I can swallow the answer that porting Domain/OS to a new box requires tremendous effort and concentrating in porting OSF is more important. I understand HP-UX and Domain/OS will eventually migrate to OSF and we're trying very hard to position ourself for this migration. However, I just can't accept the fact that Domain/OS users need to scream and yell in order to get the same level of treatment like HP-UX in new software products. Clearly HP's management has shown us over and over again how good they are in terms of helping us Domain/OS users to protect our investments :-( I've never been to ADUS. It looks like I'll go this year even though my boss may be suspicious in my motivation (spending a week in the middle of summer is what Arizonians would do for vacation). P.S. Is it true that the HP-UX installation is bigger than Domain/OS?