Re: IBM Spin Doctors on AS/400 Marketing -- MIDRANGE-L


>This thread has been too long to track, but I don't believe that I stated
>_any_ of the above.  Despite the fact that I run NT/Workstation myself, I
>don't recall ever seeing an NT ad.  The press you mentioned (in a prior
post,
>and with which I agree) is completely unrelated to NT advertising. 
MicroSoft
>has "turned the crowd" simply because they _ARE_ MicroSoft.  I despise
>MicroSoft, more than I used to despise IBM when I was on other platforms.
 I
>find it absolutely _UNCONSCIONABLE_ that the US Justice Department has
been
>unable to find MicroSoft guilty on any count.  
>
>_MY_ problem is that I have to run what my customers run (you know, those
>guys that never make a decision strictly based on "what they've heard").
> Quite frankly, my PC on site at my primary customer runs OS/2, and it's
the
>only one out of 15 developers that does.  Why?  Because I charge a rather
>large hourly rate and my CM/2 sessions stay active when all 1

Looked like you might have accidentally hit the send button. 

The above was a response of yours to a post of mine that I didn't
particularly like. Rambling and angry. I hope it wasn't overly offensive. 

I am sure you will note from my other posts that you and I share a similar
view of Microsoft. Of course, when I made similar comments about MS'
business practices with regard to OS/2, there wasn't much interest. I
suppose it is more of a concern now that these practices have brought them
to a point to compete with the AS/400.

Not long back the Gartner Group stated that NT wasn't ready for the
enterprise and that it wouldn't be for three years. I recall how a buying
public (that I judged as foolish) waited for over three years from the
time Chicago was announced to the time it was released in it's bloated bug
ridden form rather than buy and existing proven product. Someone at IBM
was naive enough to think that spending some advertising dollars on it was
enough to get it to sell and IBM did market OS/2. 

In the end, what sold more copies of OS/2 than ever before was the release
of 95. What stopped it was the lack of applications. IBM had not added
Win32 support to Warp and that is what developers were writing for.

If IBM had put the hundreds of millions they spent on marketing OS/2 into
making sure there were products for it, things might have been different.
But even Lotus would not keep their OS/2 products on par with their 95
products. 

The AS/400 arena should learn that lesson. Develop and market applications
for the AS/400.


Chris Rehm
Mr.AS400@ibm.net
You have to ask yourself, "How often can I afford to be unexpectedly out of 
business?" 
Get an AS/400.
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