RE: 5.1 upgrade

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'Why change what is working?'
Are you saying that IBM, or the vendors, are not changing the iseries
because of this attitude?  Actually IBM has made hundreds of changes to
the software, and the hardware.  Granted, the vendors are extremely slow
to take advantage of these changes because of the misguided attitude that
they need to support obsolete versions of the operating system.  How many
vendors in the wintel world only write their applications if they will
continue to support DOS on a dual diskette machine?

'Performance hit of the new function for the minimal gain'
Granted some of the releases have had some performance impact.  But
they've always had new features.  If you choose to label these 'minimal
gain' that's your opinion.

What does a native gui buy you?
A windows server has a native gui but whoever attaches to a windows server
directly and not via another client?  Never more than one!
What is native:
- hard wired programming burned into a chip on a 'dumb' terminal - be it
5250, ascii, xwindows, etc
- Netstation that boots up from the iseries
- a generic monitor and keyboard with a 20 mile long extension cable
- a linux or unix client
- a wintel client
I think a native gui is a marketing ploy that won't sell.

Granted, some of the features you want aren't there, but Konrad, if they
were would you be any happier, if it wasn't 100%?

Rock solid stability of the older os's?
I bet people would still be reporting bugs on these - if they were still
supported.

It's like people complaining that CODE/400 doesn't do this or that which
SEU does.  Why aren't they complaining that SEU doesn't do this or that
which CODE/400 does?

Rob Berendt
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Benjamin Franklin




Konrad Underkofler <kdunderk@hoshizaki.com>
Sent by: midrange-l-admin@midrange.com
08/16/2002 02:30 PM
Please respond to midrange-l


        To:     "'midrange-l@midrange.com'" <midrange-l@midrange.com>
        cc:
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        Subject:        RE: 5.1 upgrade


Rob,

I think you still miss the point. The iSeries market is declining
for many reasons, one of which is its success. Why change what is
working? Clearly people would upgrade and pay substantial amounts
for software subscription if they were getting value out of it.
Software vendors don't use new features because they know their
customers won't upgrade to the latest level or buy the prerequisite
machine because of the performance hit of the new function for the
minimal gain.

The cycle repeats, only to be broken when releases are not a 100 page
tiny print pain in the butt to put on, some new fantastic feature such as
a
real native 400 gui comes out (not in my lifetime!) or the vendors
find something that improves their product. The major vendors have
all wandered off to other operating systems that have great gui
support, advanced SQL, massive redundancy, SAN support, distributed
processing, enhanced reliability, etc... (because of what their customers
wanted)

Had a great email the other day that looked at the reverse side of
the "greenstreak" program which I think is great. It made the statement
that "greenstreak" would not be necessary if the iSeries offered the
same advance in fuctions it used to. Where is the gui, the database
support, ifs file system performance, and the advanced development
environment that would set it ahead of everyone else not just
participating in the me too java world? We still fight issues on a daily
basis that stop being issues on many other systems 10 years ago!

So the result is customers take advantage of the best of the iSeries,
the rock solid performance of the older machines and mature OS's. They
ignore the new stuff because the $$$ and pain involved do not offset
the gain.

Regards

Konrad

PS The Mac Xserve will shortly go to twin 1.25ghz PowerPc chips and it has
a real nice gui, even better to kill the high end 270s with for 10% of the
cost, even after greenstreak. I still dream about IBM buying Apple and
migrating OS/400 to coexist with OS X. Then we might have a killer low
cost
development machine with application tools galore, thousands of supported
applications and wonderful performance.


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