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  3. September 2003

Re: iSeries (non-) Marketing - part 24,566

Hans,

At 9/10/03 12:49 PM, you wrote:
I understand what you're saying. But for almost the past decade, IBM has had a severe aversion to battling MS on MS's terms. The last time we tried that was with OS/2, and few execs in this company want that to happen again! (Another symptom of that is an aversion to selling Linux as a workstation solution, leaving the desktop market to MS. Some of us here would indeed like to see at least some effort to push Linux on the desktop.)

Actually, in the case of OS/2, I believe that IBM was battling MS on IBM's terms, not MS's terms. IBM's traditional stronghold was the enterprise. They didn't know how to sell to the desktop. To expand on this, if IBM would have taken a page from the MS sales handbook, OS/2 would have been $29, bundled w/ as many PCs as possible and included a suite of useful applications / utilities.

In addition, tech support and online forums would have been plentiful and cheap / free.


Any way you cut it, the iSeries seems to get almost no ad exposure in the USA. Trade rags are probably very effective, but if it's also effective to advertise a pSeries to the general public, then the iSeries should have equal time.

I see your point since the two machines use virtually the same hardware. But they do come with different software targetted to different sets of customers. The pSeries is marketed as a low-cost Unix machine, and the iSeries is marketed as an enterprise solution. Each market segment needs different treatment.

There is a large amount of overlap and a huge amount of potential overlap. "The pSeries is marketed as a low-cost Unix machine, and the iSeries is marketed as an enterprise solution.

The problem lies in the area you mentioned - MARKETING (not the capabilities or software selection of the box)! There is no reason I can see that the iSeries can't be marketed as a "low-cost enterprise machine, that can grow with you as you grow."

Get those boxes into customer accounts cheaply and IBM will reap the benefits for many years to come. Upgrades, maintenance, services, additional software products, peripherals, etc.

-mark

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