Re: Goodbye/400

----- Original Message -----
From: "Leif Svalgaard" <leif@leif.org>
> problem is that OS/400 makes money, especially the CFINT tax.
> It is hard to drop something making money which is why the AS400
> is still around. As IBM strives to produce "linux-only"
solutions to be
> price competitive, OS/400 will bring in less money and this will
> weaken the rationale for having it around.

It's not the price, it's the margin and the market. If the market
is too small, so that sales are inefficient, it will disappear.
That will be a long time coming.

150 GB of disk costs $300 on a PC. In a few years that will be 2
terabytes or more.

There is a tremendous market inertia of lots of companies selling
high-margin software that depends on the OS/400 platform.

Open source will continue to grow, but I wouldn't run my business
on their accounting software.

If IBM goes to just Linux, they will be fighting for every dollar
against commodity hardware and software companies - including some
of the companies that they vanquished in the midrange market. 20
and 50 and someday 100 cpu processors. Running the same OS cheaper
and just as reliably, and much faster.

Brad Jensen