thompson@PAN.SSEC.HONEYWELL.COM (John Thompson) (06/04/91)
Well -- it's out. Finally. Whew. First off, thank you to all who helped out in the writing and editing of the letter. Thanks also to those of you who sent in signatures supporting these issues. Finally, thanks to everyone who lent moral support to the letter. I wanted to add some comments to the letter, but since they are my opinions, I didn't feel it correct to put other people's signatures on them. Therefore, I'm adding them in here. o Some people felt that I/we were attacking HP engineers. In my opinion, we were most definitely not (and I told them this). I'd like to think that we weren't "attacking" at all, but I realize that this is definitely an offensive action. I would hope that this letter does not result in HP/Apollo-bashing, but instead results in additional dialogue, and some changes by HP/Apollo management and marketing to recognize the needs of the "Apollo" customers. They'd like us to all be one happy family, but they can't yet treat us as one. The merger has been (mostly?) completed in the financial and organizational senses, but the customers still think of themselves as owning Apollo systems (at least I do). o This letter was a lot more work than I had imagined. Especially as it got later and later in the signature process, things got more and more hectic. Part of this was due to the normal crises that occur whenever things get busy, and part of it was due to my spending time with my fiancee (did you hear - I'm engaged ;-) A lot of it, though, was the fact that this was just plain a lot of work. (No, I'm not looking for "thanks", even if it sounds that way. HP's response will be thanks enough.) The long and short of it is that the letter went out on 6/3, when I had hoped to get it out on 5/28. Obviously, HP will not have a formal response by June first, as they promised in _Unix_Today_ -- somehow, I don't think we should object. o There were 61 signatures to the letter, which was fewer than I had hoped for. Perhaps this is an indication that people didn't agree (I doubt it); perhaps it is an indication that we've become apathetic; perhaps people considered the letter to be a "DN10000 issue" only. (Perhaps I mis- remembered -- I just talked w/ Paul Krill, and he said that there were 76 sigs on the first letter (I had thought there were > 100.)) o If you _didn't_ sign the letter (for lack of time or whatever) but you _do_ agree with it, please feel free to print it out and send it to your local reps with a cover letter stating your support. If you _did_ sign the letter, you still might want to let your local reps know how you feel about it. Thanks again to everyone who had a hand in this thing. Let's hope the reply from HP was worth the effort. -- jt -- John Thompson Honeywell, SSEC Plymouth, MN 55441 thompson@pan.ssec.honeywell.com When in danger, when in doubt -- run in circles, scream and shout.