A small piece on HP and its broad product range, their likely direction and their competitive threat to Sun.
Hurd, their CEO, in announcing their quarterly results, in a keynote speech to customers, extolled the road to commodity design and open source, and I questioned the future of HP/UX and Itanium, critically I examined tiny share (4%) in revenue
that their Business Critical Systems offered, suggesting it wasn’t enough to keep the ISV’s and developers interested, and finished with the following statement,
I think HP-UX’s future is destined to add to HP’s growing reputation as the IT industry’s operating systems undertaker and join Ultrix, True64 and VMS in the hospice.
While I may have been right, the differing big bets taken by HP and Sun told a different story. It should be noted that even then, HP was hugely larger than Sun.
ooOOOoo
Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished here in June 2016. I remade the graph/chart which is available by hovering on the 2nd hyperlink.