Re: My customer! -- MIDRANGE-L

Art,

In a message dated 98-03-04 21:04:41 EST, you write:

> I had a customer today admit to a coworker of mine that the more he
>  hears about his AS/400 (The one that works and runs his business), the
>  more he realizes that it's a powerful machine.  He says only problem is
>  that he hates IBM, their attitude is just too "high & mighty"
>  
>  Microsoft not high & mighty?

<<uh oh, soapbox mode *ON>>

Depends on the age of the customer.  Lord knows _I_ fought IBM for years
myself during my professionally "formative" years.  Back then we were split
into two camps -- those that wouldn't even buy a stinkin' punch card that
didn't have "those three little letters" engraved on it, and those that said
"Why do I even _need_ punch cards?  _MY_ machine has an interactive control
language and I have this thing IBM never thought of attaching to a midrange
system called a 'terminal' on my desk."  I counted myself among the latter.
At that time there were better midrange platforms, and software that still
beats most of what is sold on the AS/400 today from a reliability and
functionality standpoint.  To this day, IBM still forces the EBCDIC character
set down your throat, while even its own PC's use ASCII -- but beyond that, I
certainly wouldn't charcterize IBM as "high and mighty" these days.

A funny thing happened after the consent decree.  IBM became customer
oriented.  They introduced a midrange platform in 1988 (the AS/400) that could
run programs taken directly from the oldest version of the hardware and run
them on the newest with no conversion/compiling required.  Never mind that
_my_ chosen midrange (Qantel) had been doing this since 1969 -- this was a
_HUGE_ breakthrough for one of the "majors"!

Other than IBM, DEC, and HP (we won't dignify NEC or UniSys by including them
here) the midrange market consolidated, mostly due to poor marketing on the
part of the manufacturers (which is why I harp on IBM's marketing of the
AS/400, and still cheer for OS/2 when I can).  Some superior products failed,
some inferior ones succeeded -- it's the way of our industry, "survival of the
sellingest".

Well, it's too late to make a long story short.  My question is, where are the
_NEW_ people like myself that would fight this "high and mighty" attitude?
Who now would champion a platform because it provided the customer a better
solution than those that the "majors" offer, rather than because it afforded
themselves a better revenue stream?  I'd like to think that, were IBM's and
MicroSoft's positions reversed in 1980, I could have come up with something a
little more substantial that an "I hate MicroSoft" web page.

<<soapbox mode *OFF>>

Sighhhhhh.  The /400 is the absolute _BEST_ midrange on the market today, so
why doesn't _everyone_ have one, and why aren't they _ALL_ using CODE/400?

Waxing Nostalgic...

Dean Asmussen
Enterprise Systems Consulting, Inc.
Fuquay-Varina, NC  USA
E-Mail:  DAsmussen@aol.com

"Salmon Day (n) -- A day spent swimming upstream, yet ending up in the same
place you started."
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