The AS/400 Paradox

High All

Thought you'd like a little light reading(Below).   Before COMMON soundoff.

BTW,   I will not be joining those of you at COMMON this time,  so will
someone get up at Soundoff and
ask  Carol Egan(IBM Roch.)   what has been done on  the CL language since
"John Carr" got up at the last
COMMON soundoff.      I'm sure she will  just loooooooovvvvvveeee you
asking.  


John Carr
EdgeTech
Have Classes,  Will Travel
---------------------------------------------
Author:    Alex Bunardzic
Email:   bunard@intouch.bc.ca
Date:     1998/09/21
Forums:    comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc 
                                                          

Today, I'd like to venture out and say that the AS/400 has become, for
the second time in its ten years of existence, the premier
state-of-the-art computing business platform. This is a formidable
achievement, unparalleled by any other system.

When did this happen, you may ask? Not that long ago, actually. The
trouble is, not many people know about this beneficial transformation.
That's why I'd like to talk about this weird paradox.

With the release of V4R2, AS/400 has finally joined the ranks of
today's world class computing platforms. Not only that, the OS/400
V4R2, and the upcoming V4R3 did manage to outshine the competition in
many areas. While staying the most reliable and robust platform there
is, the OS/400 still managed to introduce the latest, most advanced
features of the distributed, network-centric computing model that are
necessary for conducting the electronic business on a global basis.

V4R2 and V4R3 boast the best worldwide implementation of Java and
Notes Domino server. It is the only platform in existence that
supports compiling Java bytecode bellow the machine code level (slic),
and also it's the only platform that allows for the tweaking of the
manual garbage collection. This gives them a huge advantage over
anyone, including Sun Microsystems.

The scalability and reliability of Notes implementation is by now
almost legendary.

And the list goes on and on...

The only feature that's missing at this point (to my knowledge) is the
inability of the DB2/400 to implement the BLOBS. But, don't fret,
that's coming down the pipe (according to IBM-ers, it's slated for the
V4R4 release).

Now, for the bad news: only a handful of the AS/400 professionals seem
to give a damn about these good news. I've attended this year's Common
conference, held in New Orleans. IBM did a marvelous job to present
all of their latest achievements, but people mostly couldn't be
bothered to even look. This is really sad.

Why such a paradox? It was very instructional to attend the so-called
Soundoff session, where users gather in one large room to bitch and
complain. One guy stood up and asked: "Could we have a show of hands,
please? OK, how many people here are less than thirty years old?"

Only one hand was raised (who's that weird young guy)!

"Now, how many bellow forty?"

Several hands went up in the air.

"How many bellow fifty?"

Quite a few hands went up.

"How many bellow sixty?"

Majority of hands went up.

Then he lamented the state in our aging users' group, etc.

It's seems to really be true, most people that you meet who are
involved with the AS/400 are gray-haired, thinking about their
retirement etc.

And naturally, most of them are very conservative, are sticking to the
things they've learned when they were young (twenty five, thirty or
more years ago). So they couldn't care less about the exciting
features introduced by the AS/400.

Yet, these people are the customer base, they are the bread and butter
of the AS/400 business. So the question that pops up is: "What is IBM
going to do about this? Where is the young blood?"

If the critical mass of users don't get to use these beautiful new
capabilities soon, the whole thing will simply wither away, to be
again eclipsed by the advancements in Unix, NT, and so on. Someone
would almost be prompted to ask IBM: "Why bother?"

It gets to be very difficult to discuss and compare these things when
people who are making the decisions aren't even prepared to look into
something that's not entirely familiar to them. It's actually very
easy to demonstrate this problem -- just start a thread in this group
that tries to compare, side by side, the capabilities of the new
technologies (like Java, Domino) with the capabilities of the old,
green screen, 5250 based computation, and before you know it, you'll
be accused of arrogance and ignorance, of being impolite and maybe
even of being something worse than that.

The bottom-line question that should be posed to these people is: if
the traditional AS/400 computing model is so good, why is IBM
investing billions of dollars to enable everyone to switch to this new
network-centric model? Is it just for the heck of it? Is it possible
that you guys know better what the good computing means than those
geniuses that work in IBM's labs? Are those engineers just a bunch of
ugly marketers, trying to sell us some snake oil? Do you honestly
believe that it's all just hype, and that the more things change, the
more they stay the same?


Alex

At this site.    

http://x3.dejanews.com/dnquery.xp?search=thread&svcclass=dnserver&threaded=
1&ST=PS&CONTEXT=906600517.1307377696&HIT_CONTEXT=906600517.1307377696&HIT_N
UM=23&recnum=%3c360af6af.2278838@nntp.ix.netcom.com%3e%231/1

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