Re: IBM is so confusing!

On Feb 11, 2011, at 4:05 PM, wdsci-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

While adoption is slower than we would like, I do not believe that
it's the "desert" that some make it out to be. One thing I can tell
you for sure: Many more have abandoned it since the fee was
imposed! Not by choice, but because management won't spring for it.

Actually my experience has been the exact opposite. Much to my personal surprise and chagrin. More on this in a minute.

The people who have really been "left out in the cold" are those who adopted Code/400 and/or WDSC when it was "free" and now find themselves unable to convince management to spring for the $s. Perhaps either the boost in their productivity relative to other RPGers was not apparent to management and/or they have no made it clear themselves how much more productive they are with decent tools. It really doesn't take much of a productivity boost to cover the cost of an $800+ tool when the cost of a programmer is probably at least $100,000 a year by the time you factor in health care etc. etc. Perhaps the best argument to be made is how much _less_ efficient one is going to be when forced to go back to an SEU and SDA only mode. Do your management force any .Net or Java or C# programmers in the shop to work with Notepad? I doubt it. This is a value proposition and while I would prefer that IBM had not forced us to get into it, it shouldn't be that hard a sell.

The funny thing is that since they started charging for it we have found a large number of companies that took notice and decided to introduce it along with training etc. When it was free they paid no attention - perhaps the notion being that it is only worth having if it costs $. I don't know - but I do know that the number of clients for whom we have run hands-on training has probably doubled since the fees came in. Go figure.

For all practical purposes in this case, Rational = IBM. The
divisional / moniker distinction is IBM's doing (for bookkeeping?
revenue tracking? marketing?), but from our standpoint they should
lumped together.

Nobody who has ever worked for IBM for any length of time would say this. Rational and the IBM i folks in Rochester are as much separate companies as Ford and Chrysler. They might as well be on different planets in terms of the imperatives that drive them as organizations. I don't think they are unique in that regard - most big companies have this to one degree or another. _We_ as customers see them as a single entity perhaps, but if you expect them behave that way - well you'll just be disappointed time and time again. There are historical reasons for this - for the initial underpinnings read the book "Think" if you can find a copy - sadly it seems to be out of print (Rodgers, William; Think: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM - SBN 8128-1226-3). Management by contention was a deliberate policy introduced by (I think) Watson Jr. to encourage inter divisional competition. It probably served the company well at the time but Gerstner certainly thought it was bad for the company and killed it. But something so engrained doesn't just disappear even if the CEO says so. I honestly don't think you can ever understand IBM if you think of it as one company. It just ain't that way.