HP to Heavily Support and Invest in .Net

Dr.Stress writes: "CNet is reporting 'Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft plan to invest $50 million in a joint effort to sell corporate customers on the software giant's .Net Web services efforts....HP plans to devote 3,000 consultants from its HP Services unit to the effort and also train 5,000 people in its sales and support staff.' Microsoft will provide additional installation support, and the companies will jointly market .Net services. This was announced previously, but this article contains a few more details. Frankly, as an HP employee, I am alarmed at all this closeness with Microsoft lately (this, plus the media center PCs....what's next??)."

Comments

Acquisitions sometimes turn out the other way arou

[amorsen]

Caldera bought SCO and turned into SCO. HP bought Compaq and turned into Compaq. It is not that unusual.

HP's always been in bed w/MS

[Brento]

Frankly, as an HP employee, I am alarmed at all this closeness with Microsoft lately

Then do something about it.

You remind me of the people who whine about the government, but never get out to the polls on voting day. What have you done about it? If you're alarmed by the closeness with Microsoft, then either you haven't been paying attention to HP or else you're one of the newly merged Compaq folks, who were a lot more open-source-friendly. HP's been in bed with MS for years: I distinctly remember HP being one of the first companies to adopt the restore-cd-only policy with their Pavilions, only including a restore CD and not an operating system CD. HP's Kayak dual-CPU workstations were among the first & best NT-running machines I ever used, and I know they didn't build it to run Linux. HP's always been close with MS.

So if HP's relationship with MS surprises you, then you need to get more active with your management in the day-to-day decisionmaking. Every time HP releases a solution that specifically favors MS, sometimes at the expense of their customers, speak up and try to change their minds.

Re:HP's always been in bed w/MS

[Brento]

Well okay, but look what happened to Bruce Perens when he talked down MS at HP... boom, fired.

Perens wasn't working within the company framework. If I think my company's doing something wrong, I don't speak out in public: I work closely with my supervisors and make sure they do the right thing. If they continue to make the wrong choices, and I've tried my best, then I don't play whistleblower and run to the shareholders. That marks you as somebody who's not trustworthy, somebody who isn't a team player. You pull that, you get fired, no matter how high-profile you are.

I'm not saying it's right, I'm just saying that's how the system works. The officeplace is like the Matrix - ya gotta fight the bad elements from within.

Why, YOU'RE next, HP

[puppetluva]

"Frankly, as an HP employee, I am alarmed at all this closeness with Microsoft lately (this, plus the media center PCs....what's next??)."

Let's look at past microsoft buddy-buddy relationships:

• Sybase. They promise you access to OS internals in exchange for db internals knowledge, then they steal your product.
  
• Sun. They license your technology in exchange for distribution. As soon as it seems like it is catching on, they try to sabotage it.
  
• Resellers. They allow you to distribute product. If you gain any distribution power, they coerce you into complying.
  
• Visio. They allow you to stay alive. . . as long as you don't expand into the Microsoft Office space and you "donate" technology to Powerpoint and other products. As soon as you get too valuable, they buy you for much less that they would have if they had let you grow unfettered.
  
• IBM. You commision them to write a windowed OS to compete with the Mac. They steal your money and write their own while holding up your project.
  
• Customers. You buy their product in good faith. The change the licensing terms on you (after the sale!) in exchange for fixes to the broken product you originally bought. The only reason you bought it, was because they've killed all competitive products, so you have no choice.
  

Well. . . from past experience, I think HP should bend over. . . we all know what's next.

The only defence would be to never make any money or headway in the business relationship at all. That way, if they actually kill your business while they are sabotaging it, they won't rob your grave and relabel the loot "innovation."

I feel really bad for Carly Fiorona. She may actually believe that she is digging a foundation for her company. . .

Re:Why, YOU'RE next, HP

[ortholattice]

Add:

SourceSafe - Once was a reliable CLI program that ran under Unix and allowed you to check in and out dozens of files with a simple command line. Was bought by MS, ported to NT, lost its Unix support, and became a bloated GUI that required literally hours (on a 33MHz machine) of point, click, wait...wait... (and cross your fingers not to crash) to check in 100 files one by one vs. 5 sec from the old CLI. We discovered that rebooting after checking in every dozen or so files greatly improved reliability, and I recall that our record was checking in about 50 files in a single session without a crash. At least that was the case shortly after MS bought it; we scrapped it after numerous crashes corrupted its db, and I haven't used it in years.

Media center PCs nothing new

[objwiz]

Computers have been built into stereo equipment for years. Pop open a proscan cd changer and you'll find a serial port which you can log in as root. Most stereo equipment runs embedded linux or BeOS. Shockingly more are starting to have Windows now that harddrives are getting added to the systems.

I used to write software for stereo components for Escient Labs, who had major OEM agreements with RCA, Harmon Kardon, and (more recently) Compaq (now HP). It was quite the cool experience to see all of my favorite hi-fi systems run linux.

Re:What's next?

[SerpentMage]

Exactly. This is MS's latest love slave. It did not work out that well with the others. Or MS has a new "VISION" and, well, you need new partners to realize that vision.

The old partners (IBM, DELL, BRISTOL, MAINSOFT, etc) just do not get it, like Microsoft does. But as the saying goes what comes around goes around. And right now one of the first companies that MS screwed over (IBM), looks pretty menancing for MS.

Most companies are in bed with MS

[Anonymous Coward]

...and that is despite whether they support open source products or not. Afterall, they're running a business and providing products or services for the Windows/.NET platform makes business sense -- short term and long term.

When will you people realize that there will always be Microsoft playing a large part in the market for minimumly the next 10-15 years?

Re:What do you mean, "lately"?!

[constantnormal]

Yup -- here's just the sort of thinking typified by such management types:
Let's see, we write software and we buy software from Microsoft... let's outsource our development staff to Microsoft for a cut in the pricing on the stuff we buy from them! We lose those expensive employees and get a break on our product costs! We're financial geniuses!!

So as they pollute and destroy whatever uniqueness HP products have, somebody else brings out a similar but better product for a lot less, and a third company brings out a significantly different, but more expensive product for a premium price. HP withers while the competition thrives.

Financial geniuses do not create world-beating products.

Re:God Help Us

[Anonymous Coward]

HP will provide token-gesture Linux support as long as it helps give them good press amongst the geek crowd. Unfortunately for them, they see their main revenue coming from selling Windows boxen. They wouldn't want to upset Microsoft. They fired Bruce, after all.

use this as motivation

[rnd()]

A lot of people will complain "Boo hoo, I wish HP would invest $50Million in Linux. I hate Microsoft". The fact is, HP has invested a lot of money in Linux so far, and will continue to do so. .NET web services are a standards-compliant improvement to previously existing technology that will IF ANYTHING help to promote cross-platform solutions: In other words this will help HP deliver enterprise solutions involving both Microsoft products AND gnu-linux.

If Linux was really 10 steps ahead of Microsoft, markets would recognize that fact much more than they have. The fact is, there are some areas where linux shines and some areas where commercial software shines.

To me, this is a good thing, since it will raise the bar on standards compliance in the industry and create more niche areas for linux to make its way into the enterprise.

the microsoft compromise

[Chris Canfield]

"Microsoft is in a leadership position here where we've got an opportunity to help Hollywood feel comfortable with digital distribution and to help them develop (digital rights management) solutions so consumers can have content everywhere," she said. "We have two relationships we have to balance here: the consumer who wants the content and Hollywood so they feel comfortable with that process and don't clamp down and make that impossible."

It's still my computer. If you don't trust me with your movies, then don't put the f***ing things on my computer. I'll still rent the DVD's, you will still make money.

Most people would rather own their computer and rent at blockbuster than simply having a licence for their computer and lots of pretty movies to slowly, slowly download. Since when is this any sort of *compromise* when the terms are dictated from above?

Re:.NET is great !!!

[IamTheRealMike]

.NET is great! The .NET framework library is very complete and easy to use. The .NET CLR is also very cool. I will be nice when I can develop things using Visual Studio .NET and deploy the assemblies on Linux servers using MONO.

Check out java. That does all those things, but it does them now, and it's got a lot of support and it's also multi-vendor. You will NOT be able to write stuff in VS.NET and run them on Linux, because very little of the framework classes are "open", for instance Mono uses its own gui framework based on GTK.

5 years down the line ...

[mystik]

...there will be two companies:

IBM-Sun, w/ java

HP/COMPAQ-Microsoft w/ .net

Re:Acquisitions sometimes turn out the other way a

[haplo21112]

If only that followed through, and when Compaq bought DEC, they became DEC....we might still have a viable Alpha Chip...that might have had some clout to win some battles instead of being an also ran...
ah such potential...wasted!

You are not taking it far enough

[Anonymous Coward]

MS is dominatly a supplier of Software. OSS is starting to eat into your figures and mindshare. What do you do? you go into hardware. First you trial in an area where you do not have any influence ( input devices, and perhaps game consoles). Next you set up 1 or more very large hardware companies as being totally dependant on you. The company must have true influence on the industry. Dell, gateway, and compaq by itself do not have that. HP has influence due to being in everything. Once there, partially destroy them and then buy them low. MS has > 50 Billion in the bank. They will most likely have > 80 Billion in about 2 years. How much of HP would that buy?

I use to work at the Ft. Collins HP and in spite of what I had heard, I thought that Carly had HP's best interest at heart. Now, I'm starting to wonder.

What do you expect?

[littlea1]

If HP bought COMPAQ (heavy M$ machinery) and they are betting on Itanium (Does Intel sounds familiar?), don't you think the next logical step is to sleep with Microsoft?

Re:The Digital - Microsoft Alliance

[Anonymous Coward]

I do have a collection of "Digital - Microsoft alliance" t-shirts from when DEC still existed.

Me too. Compaq bought DEC, which merged with HP. So DEC is going to try the partnership again! Where is my t-shirt?

Re:.NET is great !!!

[HiThere]

Well, I'm no fan of Java (I strongly dislike it's extremely limited form of multiple inheritance, I strongly dislike the continual need for casting, I dislike....)

It would be no surprise if .net improved on those, but the little bit that I've seen didn't indicate this.

The question is what parts will be available under an acceptable license. The answer isn't clear. And if the applications end up being non-portable anyway (due to GUI platform dependencies, e.g.), then what's the advantage?

Saying that something is technically better than Java is faint praise indeed. Now if you could say that it was better than Python...

Don't point to proprietary libraries as a reason that it's better. That proves nothing at all. Those libraries are probably unuseable. Don't point to it being submitted to standardization as a bonus, unless ALL THE NEEDED PARTS are standardized, and not covered by restrictive patents or licenses. (This could be true, but it isn't what I've been hearing.)

If you think that the CLR being multiple language is a bonus, may I direct you to a web page entitled "Languages for the JavaVM" http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/%7Etolk/vmlanguages. html (This link contains no spaces, no matter what you display shows.)

OTOH, it may well be an improved design. I'd be rather shocked if it weren't. This is *years* later.

What language is your legacy code written in? My legacy code either links nicely with any gcc compiler, or doesn't link with .net either.
(Sometimes both.)

That it is made by MS is not a de facto reason for disliking it. It is a de facto reason for not trusting any facet of it that I haven't examined. (The burnt child dreads the fire. Once burnt, twice shy. Fool me once, shame on thee, fool me twice, shame on me. You don't fool me three times. etc.)

I never hated and despised Microsoft until after I started using their operating system. After a few years, and a few license changes, it got to the point where it is now common knowledge where I work (well, within the department) that I refuse to install Microsoft software, because I won't agree to the license.

I encourage you to read the EULA before you install software. You are not exempted from the terms just because you don't read them. Your company is not exempted just because you don't care. If the crime of malfeasance applies to sysadmins (or other techs), then I suspect that agreeing to bind you company to those licenses counts as malfeasance. It really is a decision that should be made each time by upper management. No other decision of comparable significance (i.e., likely to kill the company) is made by tech personnel, and they shouldn't make this one either. I recognize that they are frequently coerced into it, but if you accept the coercion, then you are not a professional.