The AS/400 Paradox -Reply

>> John Carr <74711.77@compuserve.com> 09/23/98 10:29 >>
<Snip>
Now, for the bad news: only a handful of the AS/400 professionals
seem to give a damn about these good news. I've attended this year's
Common conference, held in New Orleans. IBM did a marvelous job
to present all of their latest achievements, but people mostly
couldn't be bothered to even look. This is really sad.

Why such a paradox? It was very instructional to attend the so-called
Soundoff session, where users gather in one large room to bitch and
complain. One guy stood up and asked: "Could we have a show of
hands, please? OK, how many people here are less than thirty years
old?"

Only one hand was raised (who's that weird young guy)!

"Now, how many bellow forty?"

Several hands went up in the air.

"How many bellow fifty?"

Quite a few hands went up.

"How many bellow sixty?"

Majority of hands went up.

<snip>

Awww c'mon, gimme a toughie!  BTW, I belong to the relatively small
"below 40" group and it weren't too long ago that I'd have been with
that "wierd young guy" in the under 30 group :)

<SOAPBOX=ON>

First off, a quibble w/the methodolgy of an age survey at COMMON. 
It's been my experience that what youger talent exists on the 400 are
usually the Jr Pgmrs, Operators, etc. and are usually the LAST ones
employers send to COMMON.  Far more typical is the attitude (which I
most emphatically do NOT agree with) of "we'll send the guy who
"knows alot" already and he can filter and digest and pre-chew all
that "really hard new stuff" at COMMON for the poor newbies back at
the office."   What's more, the younger (and poorer paid) people just
don't have a coupla thousand $s lying about to pay for plane fare,
hotel, registration, etc. whereas some more senior people may well
have enough socked away to pay their own way ocassionally.   I would
suggest that COMMON population might be somewhat skewed toward
the older end of the AS/400 talent spectrum.  The same might also
be said of this list, although there may be a lot of rookie "lurkers"
who never post.

Under any circumstance, the AS/400 paradox has, IMHOP, a great
deal to do with how and to whom the box is marketed.  The whole
point of the system, hammered home with great force by salesmen, is
it's so D&$^# easy to run that almost any trained chimpanzee could
do it.  It manages disk by itself, it configures devices all by itself, it
recognizes new hardware all by itself, etc.  So, my guess (and my
experience) is you get alot of people who buy an AS/400 for their
bread & butter, meat & potatoes apps - ya know, the GL, Payroll,
etc...the ones that couldn't care a fig about the Internet, Java, GUIs,
etc.  And they hire to the lowest commen denominator (read: salaries
:)) because their sales rep told 'em they'd save a buncha money by not
having to have a bunch of AS/400 experts to keep their machine
running.  I'll grant that a really talented dude can do a whole lot
w/an AS/400 - but fact is the machine will run perfectly well for
years without a byte wizard to nurse it along.  That means there's not
alot of push to A) use the 400 for the glitzy cool stuff - it just does
it's job; and B) there's not alot of incentive for really smart kids (the
ones who might push for glitzy stuff from the bottom up) to work on
the 400.  This was sorta covered by a thread a while back about
AS/400 education and I pointed out at the time that most of the
schools mentioned as offering AS/400 centric courses at all were
community and junior colleges where the emphasis is not cranking out
the next generation of bleeding edge developers but rather giving
people marketable skills, which on the AS/400 translates to RPG,
CL, DDS, etc. - a classic positive feedback loop.

Anecdotal evidence: my first job was with a company that sold a broad
range of software to municipal governments.  Quite often, the client
was a podunk township in the middle of nowwhere that just needed a
place to keep their books and print a few voter registration cards. 
The little old ladies who run the payroll in Wannamucka Township or
wherever don't want or need to have Email or Java apps or networks
or *ANYTHING - heck, it was enough of an uproar to their daily
routine to get them to remember to put a disk in the machine for
routine backups.

Anecdotal evidence #2: my current employer has, in the past 3 years
or so, implemented a fairly substantial (Tbyte sized) data warehouse. 
The initial implementation was on a VMS system and we're currently in
the throes of switching the whole shebang over to a Unix based
platform to get better performance, more disk space, etc.  This
despite the fact that not only the corporate office but 12 satallite
hospitals run their *ENTIRE business on AS/400 with nary a hitch or a
blip in the 6 years I've been here.  When I asked why a /400 based
solution was not considered for either A) the initial warehouse
implementation or B) the upgrade, I was given consistently blank
looks and responses like "But that's the Payroll machine" and "The
experts tell us that X was a better solution"  Those are the same
experts who don't want to work on the 400 because it's not very
lucrative for them personall, right?

Anecdote evidence 3: I even have to reluctantly admit that I myself
have succumbed to the siren song and no longer work in the 400
group here.  You may draw your own conclusions as to whether or
not I'm the type of young blood the 400 needs :), but facts are that
the hot & sexy & challenging variety of things were elsewhere and
switching jobs has SUBSTANTIALLY boosted my salary.  Yes I'm a
traitor, but my wife and kids sure do like the new house and car we've
been able to afford and I'm out of the mind numbing "Fix the vendor's
code, install the release, support year end, repeat" cycle - both
pretty persuasive arguments on a personal level to weigh against
working on the best machine around.

<SOAPBOX OFF>

All in all, I don't think it's too hard to figure out why nobody notices
the AS/400 - because it's designed to not be noticed.  It just sits
quietly in the data center, humming along without a hitch.  Granting
that, it seems pretty obvous that IBM needs to push the box as more
than "old reliable" cause bottom line is "old reliable" get translated
pretty quickly into "old BORING reliable"  IBM can (and has been to
some extent) marketing the box MORE lately, but it seems to me they
might also need to market it DIFFERENTLY and to DIFFERENT people. 
How to do that without losing the bread & butter backbone of "I
wanna run my business w/o a fuss or hassle" customers is their
biggest challenge.  I've also noticed some positive responses to Mr.
Carr's challenge to this list - quit your whining about IBM's marketing
and push the box yourselves.  I've been following the Infoworld
threads he posts here on occassion and sure enough, slowly but
surely you start seeing AS/400 pop up more and more (somebody
even recently posted the gloriously open ended question of "What's
all this AS/400 fuss about anyway").  Sure, IBM could have a low
level temp who did nothing but lurk on those forums looking for
oppotunities like that one, but I seem to recall that a certain
software mega-giant in Redmond WA is consistently castigated for
allegedly using such tactics, so maybe that wouldn't be such a hot
idea after all, leaving it up to us to spread the gospel ourselves.

Scott Cornell
Mercy Information Systems
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