Re: AIX - i5/OS feature comparison was the notorious Steve's soapbox

Every time I see a  presentation about iSeries legendary reliability and lower 
cost of ownership, it  resonates with my own experience, and I come away 
convinced of the value  proposition.
  
 But it seems that  competitive forces have, and will continue to drive the 
price of the platform  lower, even as chip technology drives the performance 
higher.  When someone  complained about the price of iSeries disks, Frank 
Soltis suggested ordering  some from the pSeries group, instead.
  
 IBM  branding, manufacturing, and middleware technology tend to homogenize all 
their  server lines, which makes it hard to draw distinctions between 
platforms.  In  order to attract new workloads to the iSeries, IBM promotes 
J2EE, Websphere,  open standards, and middleware, but more often than not, the 
same runtime  environments and applications perform better on lower priced 
pSeries and xSeries  servers.  Net.Data and PHP developers are reporting 
similar results about  performance.  Consequently, there's a tendency to deploy 
new CPU  intensive applications on the lower cost hardware, even though it 
would run on  an iSeries.
  
 When it became  clear that IBM was pricing interactive capacity at a huge 
premium, a number of  ISVs felt screwed, saying it was their applications that 
created the value, but  IBM was the one profiting from it, which furthered an 
ISV exodus to other  platforms.  The term "interactive tax" stuck.
  
 When iSeries sales  remain flat as in recent years, the platform loses market 
and mind share as the  market for servers grows.  To say that the iSeries is a 
niche product, is being  generous perhaps, which is counter intuitive, because 
when you consider the  advanced technology alone, and integrated nature, it 
makes you wonder why it's  not the dominant server on the planet.  It's still 
clear that IBM believes in the future of the  platform, and continues to invest 
in it, and is making it possible to run new  applications outside the native 
environment.  If they could just figure out how  to market it.