Scribblings? "RISC and x86 machines maintained their market share, while CISC machine revenues dropped 35.3 per cent."

X86 means CISC, so the above comment looks broken. However as market share and revenues are not the same thing the comment could be accurate, just a bit muddled...

Hello bigot, earth calling bigot...

"....Surely what those numbers reflect is that serious customers of HP/UX, NonStop, and VMS have nowhere to go except Itanium (and non-serious customers have already left the building)....." Really? So, that would imply that hp-ux, NonStop and VMS host nothing but completely proprietary applications that no competitor OS, such as Slowaris, AIX or Linux, can run. Which is, frankly, a load of male bovine manure. The truth is customers are choosing hp Integrity for their server platform over Sun or IBM offerings to run commercial apps, hence the growth.

"....Nobody (almost nobody) buys Itanium through choice, but the people whose businesses need HP/UX, NonStop, and VMS *have* to buy Itanium to get their OS and apps of choice...." Which is the same gonads as the stuff above. For a start, we buy hp Integrity by choice. Most hp-ux apps we use, such as the Oracle, SAP, Veritas or AMDOCS product ranges, will run on AIX or Slowaris, in fact many of them were originally developed on SPARC Slowaris until developers realised Slowaris was becoming increasingly irrellevant. And any inhouse code on hp-ux would usually have been done with ANSI compilers such as the C/C++ sets, so would be easily ported to another UNIX if we thought another platform was a better option. Time you morons faced facts - customers like us are choosing hp Integrity because it gives the best package - OS choice and depth, performance, application availability, price and support. For you to mutter about "lock-in" as the reason for growth is just putting your head in the sand. Grow up and get a clue.

/Point, laugh, repeat.