RE: Service Programs VS normal Programs (Jon Paris)

For me, the bottom line is that there are those shops that have individuals
that are "active" in the IT business and those individuals who are inactive.

Active (in my definition) are those who attend RPG World, DevCon, the
Connection Conference or IBM Tech Conferences, they participate in these
on-line RPG mail lists, (this one and the one at rpgiv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) and
are interested in using new techniques either by creating and sharing them
or by 'stealing' them. 
The largest group in our space consists of the ones who legally 'steal' and
use the techniques of others. The smaller group consists of those who create
and share their techniques with others. An even smaller group consists of
those who purchase non-application software, such as tools and utilities. 

I think one thing that was lost a long time ago to a lot of bleeding edge
people in our market space is the fact that virtually all ("virtually
all"=more than 70 percent) of the technical people that work with and
support OS/400 applications don't care about the technology of IT beyond
their shops or careers. By "don't care" I mean they seem largely apathetic
about it. While these people are "active" at work, they are "inactive" in
our niche market place.
If you do the math (and I can only speculate since IBM doesn't publish sales
figures) but if you add up everyone who is a member of COMMON, attends RPG
World, the IBM Tech Conf, and the other conferences, and those who subscribe
to iSeriesNetwork, MIDRANGE-L, RPGIV@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and poke around on the
news group or use one of the forums at www.rpgiv.com or other websites, you
will not even hit one third of the installed AS/400 family of systems. Dare
I say you would not even approach one sixth of the sites? Probably.
In a market where sales of 10,000 units is considered "huge" verses another
markets where selling just 100,000 to 500,000 units is considered a failure
we've got some growing to do.
I've contributed to and taken advantage of two on-line code sharing services
over the last 10 years. Both were started by one or two people in their
apartment, the first one got so big that a huge Internet conglomerate bought
them out and turned it into a commercial endeavor. The second one spawned up
as a result of the first one going commercial, and because an even bigger
success. Both these sites allowed you to post code that could be reused by
others. They did not try to be a GNU or similar with full/complete systems,
just little stand-alone tools and utilities. The second one is now so
popular that it is one of the most successful in terms of advertising
revenue. 
On at least two occasions I have been involved with grass roots efforts to
try to do something similar with the 400 market. iSeriesOpenSource.com/.org
was one failed attempt. But there have been others.
The problem of course is, as I said, there are too few people contributing
to this market place to make it worth the effort. A website that continually
posts free code that is largely written by one author will be considered
successful in the eyes of that person contributing the code, but as we've
seen, those sites eventually become stale. The good news is that source code
for the 400 stands the test of time and doesn't stop working simply because
of a new release of the OS.
The OS/400 is a niche market and we are an even smaller niche group within
that niche market. To make it work for us, we all need to realize this.
There are a few "Big Fish" but the 400 world is a little pond.


-Bob Cozzi



-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Joe Pluta
Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 8:57 AM
To: 'RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries'
Subject: RE: Service Programs VS normal Programs (Jon Paris)

> From: Joe Pluta
> 
> In any case, I certainly don't disparage innovation. I love it. I
> embrace it. But I also recognize it as a potentially disruptive force
in
> a production environment and that disruption must be weighed against
the
> good the change will provide.  That's all.

That being said, I will admit that there is such a thing as being TOO
worried about disruption, and that there will always be the need for the
innovators to push the rest of the field, whether that be in a small
shop or in our overall community.  What I see happen, though, is that
people simply want to do their own thing and not really share what
they've learned with the rest of group.

For example, my IAAI website is seeing no significant activity right
now. Nobody is offering any input, nobody is adding any insight.  It's
mostly me talking about benchmarks.  I hope that will change after I've
added the Java benchmarks this week and can start talking about
architectures.  But if you really want to see change in our community, I
think a good place to start would be to make a concerted effort to share
new ideas.  The IAAI was created for just that sort of sharing.

So please stop by and give us new ideas!

http://forums.plutabrothers.com/IAAI

Joe

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