Now Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz has taken up the theme, exploiting the fact that the industry may be puzzled what HP's problem is since HP and Compaq both ran back-office software made by the same company.

"HP's problem? It ain't the SAP install," blogs Schwartz. "And it's not related to the cancellation of PA-RISC, or weakness in their Itanium transition. Or even Dell's printer onslaught."

Here is Schwartz's diagnosis:

"To me, HP's problems spawn from the death of... their operating system, HP/UX. Like IBM, they've elected to ask their customers and ISVs to move to Red Hat Linux or Microsoft Windows on x86 systems. And if you're an ISV, how does that differentiate HP? - they're a box vendor. If you're a customer, where does that leave you with your HP/UX investments? Facing untimely change - with a vendor no longer in charge of their OS."

"As you well know, our operating system, Solaris, continues to set land speed records on SPARC, while branching into new territory on x86 - and it's the least expensive in the industry. I continue to hear customers disappointed in the realization that ISV's don't qualify to "linux" (or specifically, Fedora) - so they have to pay big bucks for RHEL if they want commercial support. And while HP stumbles into that reality, our commitment to Solaris (did I mention we're open sourcing it - check out http://www.blastwave.org) highlights the demise of HP/UX. HP/UX won't even run on HP's own industry standard servers."

Read JDJ's February Cover Story: The End of Middleware by Jonathan Schwartz

Schwartz continues: "As an ISV told me last week, 'I come to Sun, you tell me to write to Java, then write to Solaris. Clear as a bell.' If you're an HP customer or ISV, have some fun, ask your HP rep the same question - 'what should I write to?'"

That, Schwartz argues, lies at the heart if HP's problems. Not the fact its long planned switch to new SAP software went awry, causing orders disruption and forcing it to ship some orders via air rather than ground.