On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 6:31 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The low adoption rate speaks only to the fact that
this market genuinely feels that SEU is Plenty Good Enough.
OK. That sounds right to me. It also means the "problem", such as it
is, is just this side of intractable, because there are some powerful
chicken-egg relationships in play.
I maintain that the issue was never about the cost - everybody pays for
SEU and SEU is pants.
I'm less convinced about this part of your argument. It's difficult
to fully extricate cost. But first I think it's worth clarifying:
Are you saying SEU is a separate cost from the compilers? You can buy
the compilers without buying SEU?
If you (or IBM or whoever) cares about adoption rate, and you're NOT
losing money, then why NOT just put it out there?
If I remember it correctly, the issue was that customers who wanted to
keep on using only RPG, PDM, and SEU wanted cheaper licences - in
effect, they wanted to stop paying to develop Cobol and WDSC when they
weren't going to ever use either.
In other words, it was a political-marketing decision, not an economic one.
Huh. Well, I believe you. But... while you say it was "not an
economic" decision (for IBM), it speaks volumes to just how strongly
this market cares about cost. And seemingly cares in a very
penny-pinching way, not the big-picture "TCO" way of caring about cost
that I thought IBM had marketed to in the past. When IBM was enjoying
greater success, they were positioning themselves as a "high-end
experience". They probably didn't call it that, but I hope people
know what I mean: High value proposition, no nickel-and-dime
shenanigans, nothing cheap, but nothing chintzy either.
I think this is another case of you can't please all the people all
the time. Is IBM really facing a situation where they are going to
lose customers if they don't de-bundle the "development tools"?
I guess in the big scheme of things, IBM's in a position where it
doesn't matter *that much* either way. Charge for RDi separately,
bundle it, whatever. It's not like one is going to sink the company
much faster than the other one. My *personal intuition* is that the
IBM i would be in a better position and appear more attractive to...
younger developers, if its "primary coding tool" were RDi rather than
SEU, and bundling RDi is a way to commit to that message. Unless IBM
figures it's not going to make it that long and just wants to eke out
a few extra bucks while it's still able to?
John Y.
midrange.com
