Why isn't HP promoting Open VMS?

VARIOUS ANALYSTS report and company insiders reckon that HP earns an estimated $400M USD per year in profit on the OpenVMS operating system, which is one of the most robust and disaster-tolerant OSes on the market.

For example, it's used to build the Intel chips it hopefully will run on, some day.

So why is it being given short shrift in favor of Windows, Linux and HP-UX and the mythical--and nearly impossible to actually implement--Consolidated Enterprise Unix?

There's little margin to be made on Linux, Bill Gates makes more on Windows sales than does HP, and the Unix market is in turmoil these days. With all the Tru64 kernel developers sacked, how will the Consolidated Enterprise UNIX be consolidated? Magic beans? Pixie dust?

Which leaves HP with an excellent opportunity to grow, not maintain, the VMS (and NonStop NSK) customer base and revenue stream. HP's last financial report indicates that HP is turning its back on this opportunity. NSK revenues fell in the last quarter, and OpenVMS is being treated like my crazy aunt in the basement.

Alpha is rapidly losing momentum as well, despite the recent introduction of the GS1280 Marvel range. Why doesn't anyone know about the Alpha RetainTrust program introduced by Rich Marcello late last year?

Reliable sources in Nashua, New Hampshire tell me there's a bottleneck in the way and HP is called "hypnotised and paralysed" because of this.

Still, we learn that HP will make a bit of a show of OpenVMS at this week's CeBIT conference in Hannover. But will anyone know about it, we have to ask. µ