Re: Long-term RPG Contract in Detroit

Curmudgeons day was Jan 29...
But for me, it is everyday.

IMHO AS/400 and 'iSeries" were better names than the non-name nomenclature "i" as it was given when officially announced or "IBM i" which was adopted years later. (I can go to the video if you doubt my statement about the name), in fact when I get into discussions about "AS/400 v IBM i" I say, well, IBM said it is called "Just i" so that's what I call it "just i".

But regardless of how many times we wasted our time with this name-gate debate, IBM doubles-down on it. No one has the guts to go up to the IBM VP in charge and say: Hey, we should call it "IBM Blue" (or insert your favorite trademarkable and google searchable unique brand ID here).
(Sidebar: I have suggested "IBM Blue" circa 2001 to IBMers and they said it was a great idea. Then they joked and said how about "Green OS", which today would probably be a very popular name, actually.)

So at the end of the day, they have a no-name system, that no one cares about (I know, I know, there are 2-dozen or so "insiders" who do care, but that is still statistically no one), a name they have rarely promoted and a name a large percentage of their own customers who run that operating system don't even know the name of. Today "IBM i" is a cash cow for that shrinking group of individuals and VC firms. You get the same group of people anointed as "IBM Champions" year after year, save a few new deserving ones, you get the same group of Speakers at every event world-wide, and you get people talking about integrating things into their workflow "over the next few years" that should have been integrated decades ago.

This is NOT a failure on the community for calling it "AS/400" instead of just i.
This is NOT a failure on the part of the technical capabilities of CPF/XPF/"OS/400"/"i", it has always been the best at what it does at a majority of things, But it is not a pretty system to use (green screens). Some AIX/Linux/U*ix functions are better on those other operating systems. Also Windows is sexy, Mac OS X was sexy and mobile isn't doing green screen (save "Mocha") anytime soon.

No, it isn't us or the community at large that is failing the IBM Power System running the IBM i operating system, it is in my opinion, a huge failure on the "owner" of this platform. It started back in the mid-1990s when someone at IBM sat in a meeting and killed a native GUI for OS/400 (as it was called back then). We now have solid state drives, mobile devices and an Internet with crazy fast speeds in most countries outside of North America. All those things were overlooked in the short-sightedness of whomever made the decision for a non-GUI interface.

But hey, the "owners" of the platform are nearing their retirement too, so do they really care?

-Bob Cozzi