HP Leaves Developers Behind
By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
August 15, 2002 —
(Page 1 of 2)
As you know by now, Hewlett-Packard has decided to get out of the middleware business. Specifically, say goodbye to Netaction Application Server, Netaction Web Services Platform and Web Services Registry. They're toast. (See "HP Dumps J2EE Software Stack," Aug. 1, page 1.)
So I decided to do a totally unscientific survey of my Java developer friends. I called and e-mailed a dozen or so of them and asked about their use of HP products. Almost all of them had HP printers, three of them had HP Pavilion desktops, and one develops for HP-UX, the company's flavor of Unix. One had used Bluestone, before HP acquired it in the fall of 2000.
None of them had ever used HP's Netaction.
Giga Information Group says that HP had owned only a miserable 4 percent of the application server market. I'm surprised it was that high.
At one time, I did know some people who were in love with eSpeak, HP's pre-Web services platform, but it went nowhere fast. I also knew some people who liked Bluestone. Some analysts also thought that HP had had a chance to become a major power in Web services. That was then. This is now.
Today, I can find lots of WebSphere developers, plenty of WebLogic coders, a swarm of iPlanet programmers and a surprising number of hackers working away with Jakarta. It doesn't take an Ada Lovelace to figure out that HP had made a $470 million mistake in buying Bluestone.
But was it only HP's misstep, or is this the start of a trend of major companies moving away from middleware? I don't see it. Sun and IBM are both doing very well by bundling operating system, middleware and Java tools into one package. Oracle, by joining forces with Dell for hardware and with Red Hat for an operating system, is following in IBM's and Sun's footsteps, only it's doing it with alliances in-house instead.
No, I think HP was in a unique situation. It squandered its eSpeak technology lead. Indeed, at the same time it put Netaction to rest, it finally admitted that eSpeak was as dead as a Norwegian Blue Parrot pining for the fjords.
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