Interactive Tax was RE: Help me Justify iSeries

IBM charges extra for any application that is 5250 based.  You can buy the 
same i5 without much 5250 capability and that same i5 with lots of 5250 
capability and you will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars more.

Why?  Does it cost more to provide 5250 capability?  No.

The reason IBM does it is because if you are running 5250 based 
applications they believe they have you by the short hairs.  And there is 
no competitive product.  However, when they market an i5 for non 5250 
based applications, such as web or Domino serving, they realize there is 
plenty of competition so they drop the price in order to compete.

IBM has done this for years, starting with the AS/400.  Even with the old 
white CISC boxes there were server models.  Although the governor was 
nonexistent.  And at that time I believe they did have some physical 
differentials.  However we did run a plant's entire BPCS operations on it 
and they loved it.  Batch end of period processes were screamingly fast 
compared to other AS/400's.  The cool thing was that batch processes ran 
so much faster that interactive performance was pretty good also.

IBM has a governor to kick in and destroy your performance if you try to 
use 5250 applications on a box not licensed for it.  In the old days it 
used to kill performance for the whole box.  Now it only kills 5250 
performance.

There is a company marketing a software package called FAST/400 to defeat 
this governor.  IBM has tried to defeat them.  They've called in the FBI 
and had them roughed up and arrested.  But they got that thrown out and 
they still thrive.  IBM has the cover letter of every PTF begin with a 
caveat that this ptf may defeat <generic terminology referring to FAST/400 
without mentioning their name>.  So they are also trying the FUD factor.



Rob Berendt