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HP Ending OpenMail
Ron Harwood writes "Hewlett-Packard has announced that version 7.0 of OpenMail will be the last major release of the application. OpenMail is a pretty good competitor to MS Exchange and it can be used under Unix. Perhaps when HP decides to discontinue it as a product, they should open the source code." The ComputerWorld article says that this is the last *major* release - bug fixes and such will still come out. As well, they will provide support for the next five years, but it sounds like OpenMail may have reached the end of it's lifespan.
There are several reasons why a hardware company like HP might want to open source a software product when it has reached the point where it is no longer generating revenue. The most obvious reason that they might want to do this is discontinuing support for a product upsets your customers. I imagine there are a whole pile of HP customers right now that are vowing to never trust HP again. After all, they have poured time, effort, and money into implementing HP's software product and now HP is announcing plans to leave them high and dry. I imagine that if I was in their shoes I would take a serious look migrating completely away from HP. I almost certainly would at least give the Sun salesman who has been pestering me a call and see what Sun could do for me.
Sure, it's hard to let go of source code that has you have spent so much money on over the years, but don't overlook the fact that HP has almost certainly made money on OpenMail over all of those years. Opening the source code would allow them to cut down costs associated with the ongoing maintenance of the code, while still allowing them to leverage the code to sell hardware and support. They could easily turn it into a selling point for HPUX (now with a free unlimited license for OpenMail).
Of course, if HP could find a buyer for OpenMail that would probably be better. The customers wouldn't be completely stranded (although the would probably still resent HP for ditching them), and it might make them some money. But if not, then they should seriously consider opening the source code. After all, what does it hurt them to do so? They aren't going to be using that code, and they don't have another email suite that competes with it.
So, once again HP makes something innovative, OpenMail, and promptly bails out of the marketplace.
Whoa there, Chester. Check your facts before spouting. They didn't "promptly" bail out of anything. Openmail is the most popular UNIX-based corporate mail software on the market, and has been for something like 12 years. They have in the tens of millions of seats worldwide.
The reason that it's not more widely known, despite its widespread use is that it falls into a curious niche among mail solutions. Shops with mostly MS-based servers don't run Openmail, because it would require administrators to learn to use their keyboards (Openmail is CLI-administered). But smallish shops with UNIX-familiar admins can easily drop in a Linux box with a Free (speech/beer) mail solution.
Openmail finds its use somewhere in between: in UNIX environments that need highly-scalable solutions where some degree of collaboration is necessary. Openmail includes support for corporate directories, bulletin boards, Outlook MAPI, and some other features where OSS just doesn't cut it. I know, because I worked for three years trying to stay fully open source before I finally had to break down and install Openmail. LDAP just doesn't have functionality we needed (not LDAP's fault, Outlook just doesn't play nicely with it), and we needed some Public Folders functionality within Outlook, which we couldn't get on a large scale with any open source stuff. And there was no way in hell I was going to install Exchange.
The last thing is that, as reported in the ./ blurb, Openmail's support will continue for five years. Five years is an eternity in this market. If you're a sysadmin right now, think about what your organization's mail solution was five years ago. If you even had your current job five years ago, which is statistically unlikely (as if there's any other kind of unlikeliness), it is even more unlikely that your current mail setup is the same as it was five years ago.
Lots can happen in five years. They could decide to spin it off, they could decide to open-source it, they could change their minds and keep it, the government could discover some insidious MS plot to get rid of Openmail, etc. Their long-time corporate customers are pissed at this announcement, and might be able to sway them into taking one of the above courses of action. In fact, I'm pretty hopeful about it.
Openmail kicks ass, I love it, if you couldn't tell. I can support any mail user in my organization so easily, it's not even thinkable to move to Exchange, or back to sendmail/exim/qmail/whatever. Outlook clients, IMAP, POP, LDAP, it's fantastic. I know what I'll be using for (at least) the next three-four years, even if they aren't working on version 8.
Belloc (I don't work for HP, just a satisfied customer)
I got more rhymes than Jamaica got Mangoes.
Well, it's actually a male conspiracy. See, a bunch of male professors got together and created "Womens Studies" programmes at liberal arts colleges, and a bunch of co-eds went and majored in those courses. While the men were studying Finance, Engineering, Law et al. So now, there aren't many women around with the background or education for senior level management, and them good ol' boys are running the show. Heh, heh, heh, they never saw it coming.
(Note for the subtlety impaired: this is a joke).
So, what does OpenMail offer that Sendmail, Qmail, Smail, etc. don't?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'd be curious to hear the take of a certain high profile open source community figure who went to HP a short while back.
Bruce?
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Yeah, the US Openmail product manager at the time, a developer for the product and an internal trainer at the Pinewood UK development centre.
HP had no issue with telling large Openmail install bases like Amaco and Fuji why they dumped the NT release they had been hyping for the last year. This of course this is hearsay, but too many HP employees from different parts of the world have came out and said it. I see no reason to disbelieve it.
It's my OPINION MS played some role in the the final decision to ax Openmail. This s not to say a lot of presure had to be put out. It's not like the product lost money, but it certainly wasn't a profit centre for HP. I could see a little hinting from MS about a Free 50 seat OpenMail distro on a free RedHat box that talks MAPI and supports most of the outlook feature set may cause a little bit of friction.
But that's just my OPINION.
Lotus Notes/Domino R5 is all about open standards (SMTP, POP3, IMAP, HTTP, LDAP) and can be a quite good/stable solution. It does need a competent admin-force, as does anything else.
Server runs on OS/390, OS/400, AIX, SunOS, HPUX, Linux and NT. Clients are Wintel/MacOS only, though.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
[Zappa]
Check out http://www.slipstick.com (too lazy to make it a clickable link) for comments on Net Folders. Briefly they're quirky, unreliable, prone to dying for no apparent reason, etc. Nice idea but has never actually worked in a useful fashion.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
> It's kind of like the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". The priduction company went under, and no one knows who really has the rights to the film. Hence no DVD version.
It is not a problem. In a few hundred of years, when the copyright will expire, you'll get your DVD version.
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
I am not kidding.
Opening OpenMail is a CAN'T LOSE proposition.
No, it isn't, don't kid yourself.
This is the major problem with ESR's own writings. He claims that open-sourcing an application is a guarantee for its survival. It isn't. It must be both crucial and interesting ("scratch an itch") and most of all, it must be possible to participate.
Apache, Samba, the Linux kernel and every other large open source I looked at have the advantage of being very clear, easy-to-read code, so that it's easy to find a particular part of an application and patch it.
If Open Mail is one huge clunk of spaghetti code, noone will even bother looking at it a second time. I'm sure that many folks don't participate in Mozilla and Open Office because they are so darn huge and complicated...
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Actually, HP also owns a few calculator markets (financial and scientific) with their 12c and 48gx. Frankly, I'll take an HP over anything TI makes any day of the week.
They also have a decent foothold in the PC market with their desktops and notebooks, although it is by no means dominant.
As far as I can tell, the biggest problem with HP is that they seem very conservative about moving in with new products. They seem to be content with not being #1.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
Face it: Outlook/Exchange's popularity isn't about functionality, technology, or features. It's popular because it's, well, popular.
If you are saying that given the bits and pieces we already have, it might not be difficult to create an alternative, you're probably right. But someone has got to do it, and so far, nobody has bothered.
While patches and support for a product are certainly better than nothing, I am sure that you will agree that OpenMail clients probably were hoping for a great deal more than this.
And now HP has loyal customers looking for alternatives. In many cases this probably means alternatives for the operating system running their OpenMail servers as well.
Instead of turning these loyal customers out in the street HP could make several of them even more loyal customers by releasing the source code. What do they have to lose?
Let's imagine that I just spent the money and rolled OpenMail over my entire enterprise. Now, HP tells me that they have discontinued development of the product, and they are only going to support it for five more years. Basically they have just guaranteed that the time and effort that I spent migrating to OpenMail was wasted, and I now have to do the same thing again.
This is a bad thing.
Now, granted five years is plenty of time to make the move. But it's still time and effort that could have spent on something else. Having to switch because HP didn't want to support their software going forward wouldn't make me more inclined to buy from HP in the future. Basically, HP has proven that their software is not a safe bet.
Egads that's a sexist remark!
Yes, that could be a sexist remark, except that the real sexist issue is that there are few, if any, other woman CEO's in tech industries? Why is that?
Unlike the more traditional societies across the Pacific or Atlantic, where woman are expected to keep house, bear children and look good, in the US woman are expected to compete in the marketplace, and they have been expected to compete since feminism started in the '60s. That's almost 40 years ago, plenty of time for women to work their way up the corporate ladders, yes, the number of women CEO's in tech companies could probably be counted on one hand. Why?
Could it be the oft invoked glass ceiling? Could it be latent sexism on the part of the existing patriarchy? Are women less good (overall) at the tech things (This is not a slam at women, most geeks appear to suffer from borderline Auspergers sydrone, where they get obsessed over an os, or a technology, and play with it until they know it inside and out, to the exclusion of personal hygeine and social lives. Woman tend to treat things a little more balanced, thankfully.)? I don't know, but I think the real sexist remark is that 50% of our population is not reflected in the boardroom.
What makes you think that HP isn't developing HP-UX? I support HP-UX machines and they are still coming out with new versions. While HP-UX tends to lag the gee-wiz cutting edge stuff like SunOS, it is ten times more stable than SunOS.
Actually, if they were willing to provide support (for $$$) open-sourcing the program would be an extremely smart move. As Eric Raymond explains in his book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by open-sourcing the project they get free developement and bug fixing. And by providing support services, they can make a ton of money without investing sunk developement costs. While you may raise the objection that other companies could also provide support, HP would not only have the cred (it has been their project) but also has the support service infrastructure set up. These two advantages would ensure that they were primary support providers for the near future. Given this, they would get the mucho moola of support services, without the hassle of developement. Sound like a good deal?
I wish I had a sig, I wish I had a sig, I wish I had a sig, oh, wait...
...give away code?
Perhaps when HP decides to discontinue it as a product, they should open the source code.
It is highly likely that much of the code in open mail will be reused in a future product. If not the code itself at least the technologies contained within it.
I think mainly I am sick and tired that every chance people get they want something for nothing and get angry if they don't get it. There is good arguments for letting everyone use the knowledge to try and make newer and cooler things that will advance society, but there is also a pretty good argument that if you spent your time and resources to create something, that thing is yours to distribute how you see fit.
I guess what is really awful in the open source world is that the people that really annoy me aren't the ones I should be listening to. I know that many of the people developing open source projects do a TON of work on thier own and come a long way in providing alternatives for the world and not asking anything in return. Could those people who are a positive force in Open Source get rid of all the whining gnits that keep shouting "Give me your software and your mp3's!" so that I can renew my faith in the motives of the Open Source world.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
I gave up on the Notes GUI when R5 came out, after years of gnashing my teeth over Lotus' UI fecklessness.
Lotus has always had UI problems, such as incomprensible dialogs and wacky task flows, but but R5 took the cake. I could imagine the crack smoking marketroids scheming this one out: Hey, we'll make it look like a web browser so it will be easy to use! (Hey, I think AutoCad should have a web browser interface so it will be easy to use!).
The old tabbed interface of Notes worked great, it was especially liked by newbie users. The great irony is that the most usable of the complex web sites (Amazon) uses a tabbed folder metaphor.
Is it too much to task for a huge company like IBM to just hire a few HCI experts?
I think the Domino server rocks, though.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Sound like a good deal?
Sure. Trouble is, even with an application as crucial as this (groupware) where there is no current alternative in the open source area, open-sourcing it is no guarantee that other developers will join and help.
Look at Sun's/Stardivision's office suite and at Netscape's browser. Both application types are very important, yet both are mostly fostered by in-house developers.
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- Address Book: Use a standard LDAP server.
- Mail: Use a standard IMAP server. BTW: Pop3 should be sufficient in most cases.
- Scheduling: Set up a FTP server where on which the users can exchange their Free/Busy data.
- Public Folders: Someone ever heard of an Intranet or News servers?
- Out of office: OK, that's harder to realize. Create a web interface that writes a message on their UNIX-Email accounts and uses vacancy.
OK, this requires the users to do some more configuration tasks on their clients (setup LDAP, MAIL and FTP), but despite this: Which features are you missing?I saw this posting, and thought that, if nothing else, the MAPI code might benefit the open source community in general, or the OGS project specifically.
I followed the link in the story to the OpenMail home page, and then the OpenMail contact us link.
I asked them to consider Open Sourcing the product at end of life. I asked them nicely. (If you do this, please ask nicely, too.)
I explained that there are projects that could benefit from their work, and asked them to consider that as a possibility.
Here's the automated response I got from them. I'm looking forward to a 'real' answer, too.
Re: If you're discontinuing this product, might you Open Source it?
Thank you for your enquiry.
As stated on our Assistance web page, we are pleased to respond to anything to do with HP OpenMail. Allowing for time differences around the world, we aim to respond to messages within 48 hours. If a full response is likely to take longer than this, or the volume of mail exceeds our expectations, we will still get back to you within 48 hours to tell you when you might expect a full response. (Please note that we can only provide responses to inquiries composed in English.)
If you have submitted an inquiry that is not related to HP OpenMail, we will forward your inquiry to the appropriate HP organization. Because different HP organizations provide different product support options, you should consult the Assistance page related to your inquiry to understand what type of support you can expect. To help find the appropriate on-line Assistance page, please use the Assistance directory page.
Thank you again for contacting us
The HP OpenMail team
Regards,
Anomaly
PS - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you would like to know more about this, please contact me at tom_cooper at bigfoot dot com
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
You can get the source code to OpenMail by paying some large sum of cash and signing a NDA. But that's only part of the problem.
The real issue is Openmail is a 12 year old product. And at the very base of the is a DB server that was produced by a company that's no longer in existance. It's kind of like the movie "Buckaroo Banzai". The priduction company went under, and no one knows who really has the rights to the film. Hence no DVD version.
This is not to say that a source distro couldn't be made. However, someone would have to sign an agreement with HP to take responcibility to remove the items HP doesn't have the rights too and replace them with GNU/GLP/Whatever items.
Really, a RedHat or a Suse would need to step in I think in order to get this done. Most likely redhat because that's what the current Linux version is written to.
I don't want to light you up here. But, there is a well documented single user restore method. You just need to set the system up correctly ahead of time. See HP documents titled "Single User Restore".
I think people expect a lot of HP openmail, and don't consider that you're running many more accounts per server than exchange. Things take time. If you attach a V-series HP-9000 to a EMC, plug in Omni back you've now created a e-mail system that requires no down time for back-up. Create a temp third mirror, run OM suspend, break the mirror off, start backing up. All the uses notice was a 15 second pause. A system like that could support at least 8000 connections, and most likely a user base of 14,000+.
Mail forwarding is based on a simple file. You can turn it off and on with about 15 lines of code to figure out where the files are kept and single SED command to flip around the auto actions.
This is not to say it's for the faint of heart, but since it's Unix based there isn't a lot you can't do. Writing scripts to automate you're daily proccess is a big deal for a good system. You have to be willing to read the all the docs (between the manual and the OTNs you're looking at 1000+ pages of stuff. But hey, that's what flexible monolithic email systems are all about.
HP OM does have bugs in it certainly, and it doesn't walk on water. But the issues you listed can be overcome. Some of them are even well documented.
--
It's really the poor craftsman who blames his tools.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
So, once again HP makes something innovative, OpenMail, and promptly bails out of the marketplace. HP needs a museum for leading tech they've developed that they stopped supporting. In this museum they can inlude the HPUX UNIX version, Open Mail, their optical storage units, and their partnershipped with Bell Packard-Bell computers.
It's a shame, the only product they're good at selling (the HP laserjets) have their imaging engines made in Japan by Canon. It's almost a painful metaphor for America, original products are no longer sold, and only rebadged Japanese products are keeping the company afloat.
This could be a big loss - a strong (compatible) competitor to Exchange with huge potential, just fading into history.
But if open sourced, it could be one of the biggest wins in years. Imagine the inroads Open Source could make on Exchange starting with OpenMail... any thoughts on how we could plant the 'suggestion' with HP?
Now, if all those fail, the next step might be to opensource it, but I think that would be after they are done supporting it.
--
Free Mac Mini
-----Original Message-----
From: openmail@hp.com
To: tom_cooper@bigfoot.com
Sent: 3/2/01 5:54 AM
Subject: RE: If you're discontinuing this product, might you Open Source it?
Hello Tom,
Thanks for getting on touch. This is something that everyone is asking
for at the moment. Any news that we have will get posted on our website.
Kind Regards
OpenMail Helpdesk
-----Original Message-----
From: tom.cooper [mailto:tom_cooper@bigfoot.com]
Sent: 01 March 2001 16:37
To: HELPDESK OPENMAIL
Subject: If you're discontinuing this product, might you Open Source it?
Name: Tom Cooper
Email: tom_cooper@bigfoot.com
Phone: (301)380-7057
State: MD
Country: USA
Comment:
If this is the last release of this product, would you consider open
sourcing it? I am a technology professional who likes to see options
- we're stuck with Exchange because of the proprietary MAPI protocols.
Would it be possible to GPL this code (or a similar license) so that we
could be free from the MS back end?
I'm involved peripherally with an open source effort to create an open
groupware product, and I think that this product could help with that
and many other efforts.
Thanks for taking the time to read this message. I'm interested to
hear what you have to say about this possibility.
Regards,
Tom Cooper
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Are their any alternatives to Openmail that support the address books and other fancy useless features that management requires us to use that are in MS Outlook without using MS Exchange Server? I have sendmail running but it just provides basic email send/receive, it doesn't support sharing MS Outlook address books. I understand its some sort of LDAP/Samba share, but I am unable to figure out the configuration, but Openmail is the only mail server I am aware of that supports all the fancy features of MS Outlook other then MS Exchange server.. All their any alternatives to Openmail that support all these extra features in MS Outlook other then MS Exchange Server that I can use on Linux?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
This was previously mentioned at Slashdot in a prior OpenMail story. This Summit Strategies, March 20, 1997 page may be of interest as well:
Looks as if MSFT may have exploited HP in the past to fend off competition in the enterprise communications market.
My own read of the current action: Bruce is quite possibly right, there is too much third-party baggage in OpenMail for it to be a successesful free software play. However, opening up core APIs to the free software movement, particularly for projects such as OpenFlock or Evolution could be very helpful. Still, I've got to say that Don Marti's analysis smells strongly of truth.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
You do have reference for that story, don't you?
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be sure to read the part about openmail generating 'friction' with their microsoft relations.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce_Hollamby@hp.com [mailto:Bruce_Hollamby@hp.com]
Sent: Monday, February 26, 2001 2:42 PM
Cc: Bruce_Hollamby@hp.com
Subject: OpenMail Future Beyond 7.0
Hi All,
Some of you have already been informed of recent decisions regarding
the future of OpenMail, but I wanted to make sure that all of you
received the news. A letter went out to the OpenMail installed base
today to inform them of the developments and I wanted to make sure
that you had the letter as well in case you were contacted about it
(see attached).
The bottom line is that the next release of OpenMail, v7.0, will be
the last release to include new features and functionality. Beyond
OpenMail 7.0, the only releases provided will be to provide bug fixes.
Hewlett-Packard will continue to support OpenMail 6.0 and 7.0 for the
next 5 years for any existing and new customers. Version 7.0 is
expected to be available off the OpenMail website by next week.
Given HP's new software strategy, OpenMail would be the only end-user
application in a middleware software stack. That coupled with
OpenMail's strength vis a vis Exchange, creates friction to HP's
Microsoft partnership and PC related revenue.
OpenMail has been the most reliable, scaleable, flexible, feature
rich, and the lowest total cost to own and operate messaging and
collaboration server software on the market. Version 7.0 continues
this claim and is still a viable option for customers looking for a
messaging server to start with or as a replacement for exchange.
The new business part of the OpenMail team will no longer be in place
as of March 1st, which includes myself. I have enjoyed working with
OpenMail and working to provide you and your organization with an HP
solution that meets with you and your customer's needs. I have
appreciated your support and look forward to working with you or your
organization again in the future. If there is anything I can do this
week, please let me know and I will do whatever I can. If you need to
reach me for anything else or to just keep in touch, I can be found at
bruce_hollamby@yahoo.com.
Best regards,
Bruce
_______________________________________
Bruce Hollamby
Channel Program Manager
OpenMail Operation
Hewlett-Packard Company
19410 Homestead Rd., MS 43UE
Cupertino, CA 95014
Phone: +1-408-447-5132
Fax: +1-408-447-5816
Cellular: +1-408-839-8050
Email: mailto:bruce_hollamby@hp.com
Check out http://www.hp.com/go/OpenMail
That's not something I wanted to hear. I would have liked to implement it. Now that they're giving up, I don't think anyone would want to move to it.
Don't give up *all* hope, however. There is a little known product from Bynari called TradeServer. It's compatible with Outlook (100% I'm told), $500 for unlimited users, runs on Linux, and (here's the kicker) the fully featured UNIX client is open source. They even host it on SourceForge.
It doesn't have PGP support yet, but the client is quite impressive, usable as a standalone client.
I don't know why nobody has been mentioning it here, though.
So for all of you that have been trying to stave off that management push for an Exchange install by showing them OpenMail info (like I have), here's a solution they might like (plus they wouldn't know the difference if you just installed it, wink, wink).
I heard they even switched their own internal servers from OpenMail to Exchange, which seems to have been causing chaos within HP a couple of weeks ago.
I wonder what Micros~1 has offered HP in return for taking a competing product off the market.
The true open source replacement for both OpenMail and Exchange is Citadel. It's rapidly shaping up to be a real Exchange killer. Powerful multithreaded server, transactional data store, POP and SMTP currently working, IMAP by the end of the year... bulletin boards, chat, instant messaging... clients in development for multiple platforms, web-based access already here... We're also planning on doing a MAPI connector similar to the one that HP wrote for OpenMail.
Citadel has already reached a point where people are starting to implement non-trivial projects on top of it. Come join the fun and help us stab MS in the back like they did to HP!
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
I hope that someday we will see a truly viable open source alternative to MS Exchange. Exchange has some good concepts, but a horrible implementation. A portable, modular system could create a wonderful foundation for an information transfer, storage, and sharing architecture. Unfortunatlely, I don't see any serious efforts to create one at this time.
World Beach List, my latest project.
Speaking as a sysadmin who has to deal with this krufty, irritating, godawful product on a daily basis, I am entirely relieved that we'll soon have to port to something else. (Mmmmm... Exim....) Openmail isn't all it's cracked up to be. The internal logic is insane. It does about seventeen disk writes every time you send a message. Restoring a single user's account involves restoring the ENTIRE SYSTEM from tape and exporting that user. Speaking of which, exporting a user's mailstore can take HOURS if they have a few megs of mail in there. And its administrative support is just generally crappy... there are no commandline tools for, for instance, turning someone's forwarding on or off. Trust me, you folks are better off not having to deal with it.
Very recently, I'd been in the market for a new enterprise messaging server to replace our companies Exchange 5.5 server, and I looked very long and hard at OpenMail. What I found, made me sad.
OpenMail seems to have been marketed as a direct competitor to Exchange, but the reality of it's abilities falls short of this claim. I was sorely disappointed, since I wanted to move away from a windows-based solution.
From the recent beta I was using, all OpenMail is is an SMTP server, with an integrated POP/IMAP server and a web-base mail client application. Missing is all the calendaring, folder synchronization, and all the other schwag that makes Outlook so damned popular with the corporate crowd. I was sad, because if this was the best that there was to offer, the appropriate choice was obvious.
Does anyone else know of any application suites which come closer? I've looked in vain...
Couple things to keep in mind about OpanMail. It's not a US HP product. It's a UK HP product. The developers there do things very well, but aren't always thought of well by the US team. That being said here's how MS crushed OpenMail.
Back in the day before lotus alienated the cc:Mail user base OpenMail was the king of cross platform e-mail systems. It could talk to cc:Mail Clients, Lotus Notes, MS Mail, and Exchange (Back when exchange was a very young and imature product). IBM even resold OpenMail with an IBM label on it. Openmail ran on the three major Unix platforms of the day. HP, Sun, IBM. One day the engineers at pinewood had a great idea. Let's do an NT port.
And so it began. HP went through the normal product life cycle and actually sold a production NT version...for exactly one quarter.
So what happened to that version? Ahh, here in lies the monopoly play. See, MS got wind of Openmail for NT. While it was still a rev 1 product and had several bugs, there was no doubt the feature set was there and with in a year HP would have a product that would crush exchange with a decent price and a feature set MS wouldn't have for another three years.
So, the story told by the engineers at pinewood is basically this. MS goes to HP and says if you continue with the product you're out compedition and we will no longer be including you in any partner programs. Now HP makes far more money on selling NT based servers, Raids, and all the service and support that goes with the products then it does on one software product. And being cut out of early releases and not having drivers and hardware certified would kill the business.
So, HP, after investing a lot of time and money into a port, kills it. And thus loses a major market. If you don't think that's abusing monopoly power, I don't know what is.
Dude, you have to understand that its all relative to the almighty dollar.
Trust me i work in retail and deal with hp's products. They permeate every market where they can make a profit - HP printers, scanners, computers, monitors, CD burners, paper, CD-R's, CD-R label maker kits, Iron On T-Shirt transfers, the list goes ON AND ON, they're probably the best branded name with the most permiation in the entire store. And you always pay a premium for the HP name on it - lexmark printers with better resolution cost less, microtek scanners that do 24X12@42bit cost what 12X6@36bit scanners from HP cost.
So if you think that they got scared by competition with Exchange server, you clearly have not got a grasp of modern economics. These people spend Billions each year on marketing, market research, and R&D. If OpenMail had been economically feasable, they would have marketed it. As it is, they must have realized that there was little to no money to be made in a resonable amount of time, versus cost of maintaining a software package that is mission critical to a major company, and creating new releases of it so that it grows with the economy, making sure it is infinately scaleable, etc.
If they had thought they could get one red cent out of this, they would be pushing it in the corporate face of america.
You always have to ask what the bottom line is. And its always money.
~zero
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