“Are these people customers?” Stachnik asked. “I'm no business major, but in my book, a customer is a person who buys something from you. If these people are buying support from software vendors, then they are certainly customers of that software vendor. But regardless of their protestations of loyalty, you can't really call them HP customers any longer.” Stachnik said that when Computerworld quoted CSY GM Winston Prather in November saying there are “several thousand” 3000s in service, that estimate was accurate in terms of customers. “You'd have to include all the people that are using obsolete, unsupported or second-hand hardware purchased from and supported by brokers to call Winston's quote an understatement,” he said. Of course, there’s the thousands of sites running their home-grown applications on hardware that didn’t need to be replaced, a more charitable description than “obsolete, unsupported or second-hand.”

The welfare of the platform and its community appear to deserve a better description at present, according to the e-mails CSY was sending to customers after the announcement. “Today, the HP e3000 platform is still strong, and the relevant ecosystem is still viable,” Stachnik wrote in letters to customers. “However, we felt a responsibility to tell our customers that we could see a time coming when we would no longer be able to sell and support HP e3000 systems in the way our customers have come to expect.” The expectations might be more on HP’s part than on those sites operating without buying HP 3000s. And the definition of customer, a company buying HP’s solutions, fits the HP explanation that “in recent years, our customers have demonstrated a clear preference for solutions based on low-cost, high-volume, open platforms based on standards.” In light of the definition of customer as “current,” HP’s departure from the community appears to revolve around its inability to sell the systems the way it has approached the 3000 market since the early 1990s — as vessels for applications offered by resellers, rather than the general-purpose computers used by the majority of the 3000 installed base.