RE: The law of unintended consequences

If you're an application developer moving out of 5250 mode and getting into
serious design (MVC stuff), it doesn't make sense to ignore other platforms.
I face customers on a regular basis walking away from my iSeries application
simply because it's iSeries.  If my application became available on another
platform, I'd stand a fighting chance of winning the business.  There is
another group of customers unconcerned with/oblivious to TCO concerns; other
platforms may appear to be cheaper (even after I tacked on a big support
contract) and that opens another door for a sale.

Although my credible experience with other platforms is limited, I'm not so
much of a Chauvinist that I believe nobody else on the planet has data
queues, record level access, system API's (although with MS, you never
know), etc.  My proof is simple: look at all the big-time applications
running on non-iSeries/non-mainframe platforms.  It's probably ugly, but
people do it and people buy it.

John's mention of the Law of Unintended Consequences got me started on this.
If IBM's trying to force us to HTML with tools and facilities that are
charitably described as a work in progress, they're pushing us into an area
where IBM's not prepared while alienating customers with 5250 taxes.   IBM
acts like a corporate St. Patrick: they're driving the green-screen snake
out of the iSeries (and don't try to ruin my metaphor by telling me there
are no snakes in Ireland).  We still have Newton's Third Law...

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On
Behalf Of Nathan M. Andelin
Sent: Tuesday, March 05, 2002 6:21 PM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: Re: The law of unintended consequences

From: "Reeve Fritchman" <reeve@ltl400.com>
> Wouldn't it be amusing if IBM really did have a warm spot
> in its cold corporate heart for the iSeries, only to see the product
> base erode as applications being migrated out of 5250 mode ended
> up running in non-iSeries environments?

Someday, the user interface may be HTML, instead of 5250 based.  But which
applications would move?  It's pretty hard to build an iSeries application
that doesn't  use at least some OS/400 specific features.  Data queues,
message queues, output queues, spool files, CL modules & commands, system
APIs, record level database access, security objects, RPG, backup & restore
procedures, etc.

Nathan M. Andelin
www.relational-data.com


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