Re: The demise of Midrange Computing - Is AS/400 is dead ?

From: <barsa@barsaconsulting.com>
To: <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2001 9:12 PM
Subject: Re: The demise of Midrange Computing - Is AS/400 is dead ?


> IBM is in the highest corporate tax rate. Lets say for the sake of
argument
> that's 36%.   With that in mind, today IBM pays a profit ox X, and pays a
> tax of Y.  If they advertised the AS/400, they would sell more of them.
> The AS/400 is a high profit margin product, so certainly any advertising
> they did would more than offset the expense in profits.

Invalid assumption that advertising guarantees additional revenues.

> Keep in mind, "relevant" platforms (despite however irrelevant they might
> be) like Oracle, sponsored the first night of the World Series, but IBM
> keeps silent on the iSeries.  Oracle gets students coming out of college
to
> learn their technology, compared to a relative poor job that IBM is able
to
> do with the iSeries.

Okay, hasn't IBM for years (decades) sponsered the Olympics, PGA
tournaments, tennis tournaments, etc. ? But their problem has been that
baseball is where the buyers are? Well I'll be!

I know that IBM used to donate millions every year in hardware and support
to colleges. I haven't looked in a few years, though, maybe Gerstner has cut
those out.

> The entire industry is having massive layoffs, but not the iSeries.

Maybe too many companies are wasting money on ads that don't pay.

> Is this a spoof comment, you bet it is.  IBM is consistently spoofed by
> their own senior management, by prohibiting the iSeries from doing
> competitive advertising.  The iSeries-AS/400 is the best computer
> technology in the world.  Let's keep the secret safe, and save IBM from
> paying all those taxes.

Personally, I think that's crazy. I don't think people run out looking to
buy a platform and then go shopping for what programs they can buy to make
it do something. IBM ads say that IBM has "solutions." Advertising the
AS/400 or iSeries as a "solution" doesn't really make sense unless you know
what kind of other factors there are in the shop you are working with.

Where IBM fails is in making sure they pitch the 400 for every possible
implementation. But maybe I'm wrong and they actually do. I mean, I would
guess that most shops which come to IBM for the first time are already
deploying an existing NT or Unix solution. In those cases, it might often be
that the 400 is not going to fly with the customer.

But I just can't imagine an exec seeing an ad during a baseball game and
deciding he needed an AS/400, then buying one. Then, of course, he'd have to
start asking around about what it could do for him. If a guy did this, what
are the odds he's going to be the kind of customer who'll be happy with his
system? Won't he be unhappy as soon as the next shiney new ad hits his TV
screen?

> Al - in Boston on vacation
>
> Al Barsa, Jr.
> Barsa Consulting Group, LLC
>
> 400>390
Chris Rehm
javadisciple@earthlink.net
If you believe that the best technology wins the
marketplace, you haven't been paying attention.


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