Workstations unplugged: HP announces the end of the road for its original workstation line, while the successor xw line builds momentum in the market.(Trends & Technology)(Hewlett-Packard Co.)

HP workstations are dead. Long live HP workstations.

HP recently made official what we have all long known was inevitable: It announced the end of its venerable PARISC workstations. But while HP is bidding farewell to one of its two workstation lines, it is reveling in the success of the other.

The company's PA-RISC workstations have trickled out of the factory for some time, but HP's xw line--based on platforms from independent hardware vendors (IHVs) AMD, Intel, and Nvidia--has been on a roll. With a strategic and well-orchestrated effort to not only push its own branded products but develop the overall market as well, HP's position in the market has been on a steady upswing for some time. Once just a speck in Dell's rearview mirror, HP is now hot on the market leader's heels, accounting for 32.7 percent of units in the second quarter of 2007 compared to Dell's 42.5 percent.

In the third quarter, HP's x86-based xw line outshipped PA-RISC by a factor of more than 100 to one, so dropping the older line isn't going to take much steam out of the company's momentum in the market. In fact, had decision-making been based purely on the numbers, HP might have pulled the plug long ago. But this particular business couldn't be measured purely on dollars and cents, as there were other strategic concerns--not to mention unforeseen developments--that have led the company to hold onto the PA-RISC line far longer than expected.

We've Seen this Coming

Reaching its end of life doesn't mean the PA-RISC workstation has been a failure. On the contrary: The line served the company well for years, outlasting many of its peers. Born essentially as a client-based spin-off from the minicomputer revolution of the 1980s, the early workstation delivered unmatched deskside performance, leveraging the power of the leading proprietary processors of the time, like PA-RISC, DEC's VAX and Alpha, SGI's MIPS, Sun's SPARC, and IBM's POWER.

But the emergence of the PC platform irreversibly altered the evolution of the workstation. More than technology, it was the PC industry's economy of scale that slowly eroded the business model for traditional proprietary platforms. Over time, chips from IHVs, such as Intel, improved dramatically in terms of both performance and price to the point that both traditional workstation OEMs and customers alike had to take notice.