HP 3000 division General Manager Winston Prather said at the HP World management roundtable that he made the decision last year to pursue larger development projects for the platform, instead of committing resources to many more detailed development requests.

“As R&D manager, I made a decision to allocate most of our resources to big-ticket items,” Prather said. “So you can tell me that was not the right thing to do, and I’m willing to debate that with you. I felt we had some holes in our product offering that we really needed to focus on, and they’re not the types of things that show up on the System Improvement Ballot (SIB) list.”

New platforms and new IO subsystem will be taking up the R&D lab’s bandwidth for the near future, Prather added. “Because we were focusing on the big-ticket items, some of the things on the list didn’t get done.”

Current R&D manager Dave Wilde said if HP were to focus on the enhancements on the SIB, “we would lose track of some of the longer term things. We’ve done that in the past, not invested in the more important things. When we do that it feels good in the short term, but it’s kind of like credit card debt. It piles up. We want to make sure we make the long term investments with the limited resources we have. Beyond that, we’ll pick the right things that are important.”