Does HP get it? - Computerworld

Does HP get it?

By Frank Hayes - Computerworld - Blog

October 4, 2005 - 4:13 P.M.

The HP user group that's trying to keep HP's MPE operating system alive, OpenMPE, is now trying to raise money so it can take over the operating system when HP officially ends its life at the end of 2006. How much money? $1.5 million the first year, $1 million each year after that. HP's official response? The company isn't making any promises, no matter how much money OpenMPE raises.
Which leads to an interesting question: Why not? Right now it looks to all the world like HP is jerking these users' collective chain. And the benefit of that is...what?
I can see why HP might want to simply bury MPE. It's old, it's proprietary, it has no future at HP, there will undoubtedly be a trickle of requests for help from HP that will continue for years if HP doesn't put a stake through MPE's heart, stuff its mouth with garlic, cut off its head and burn its body at a crossroads at midnight.
Fair enough, HP -- if you want to bury MPE, just do it! Make a firm decision, now, and announce it. This isn't a negotiation, and never has been. HP owns MPE; the OpenMPE group has no bargaining leverage at all. It's HP's decision to make.
I can also see why HP might want to let someone else take over MPE. It would make a certain subset of HP customers happy, and that happiness might materialize as loyalty and future sales. It would offer the opportunity for a high-profile "we love our customers" announcement in which HP rakes in the kudos for being so generous at the same time as it publicly washes its hands of any responsibility for MPE.
If OpenMPE runs out of money or otherwise fumbles, there's no downside for HP -- handing off the source code wasn't HP's idea, and HP will happily help users migrate to a current HP product. If OpenMPE is brilliantly successful, there's still no downside -- these HP diehards aren't going to run MPE forever, and MPE isn't likely to eat HP marketshare.
Best of all for HP, handing off MPE would demonstrate that HP isn't the cold-dead-fish vendor of old. It's a different marketing model, a way of converting a dying OS into a benefit instead of a liability, a slightly-Linux-like variation on access to source code -- in short, it shows the marketing creativity, flexibility and hipness that have always been at the other side of the universe from HP.
In sum, it would demonstrate that, in this brave new world of open source, shared source and user-supported source, HP really does get it.
So HP could bury MPE or hand it off, and either way people could understand. What's the only one way for HP to screw this up? By sitting on the decision until an arbitrary end-of-2005 deadline, while MPE users dangle.
And right now, HP sure looks like it hasn't got a clue.