Re: Random thoughts from COMMON

[mcrump@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Good point David.  There was a lot of interest (in the sessions) on the
UNIX and laptop AS/400.  However, John is right.  Dr. Soltis said they
would love to do it but they need a business case to help justify.  If you
have any let IBM know.

Of course it does bring up some interesting dilemna's.  Regarding UNIX some
people would regard this as the end of OS/400 which Dr. Soltis says isn't
happening (IBM is currently re-investing a ton of money in Rochester - 20%
increase in advertising, a rewrite of DB2 for OS/400 (soon to be Universal
DataBase for OS/400), etc.), will IBM confuse the market by offering two
UNIX platforms, what happens to the RS/6000, can the market handle another
UNIX vendor, etc.  Personally, if it means more applications available for
the AS/400 that seems to be a good thing for me.  Tom Jarosh and Frank
Soltis both indicated that they are agressively pursuing existing UNIX
ISV's to port their applications.  My question to UNIX vendors is, if it is
indeed easy to bring it over why don't you bring it over now?  Every vendor
that I talk to that position themselves as NT or UNIX only gets a good
grilling by me.  Most cases the reason for not porting seems to be one of
perception...

The laptop would generate some sales, question is if it enough to recoup
the investment?  Probably not.  However, could one consider it a marketing
tool?  If you could buy a smaller, cheaper, 64-bit AS/400 would you?  Some
people at the sessions were extremely interested.  One customer, Nick (I'm
forgetting his last name) said if you have a small system that runs UNIX
applications as well as AS/400 he'd buy 5,000 of them and give them all to
the students at Cal-Berkley.......










At 09:39 PM 10/11/98 , John Earl wrote:
>There was recently a post out on comp.sys.ibm.as400.misc where an IBM'er
>claimed
>that IBM had AIX running on the IPCS.  I was able to confirm this at
>common... it
>was done for a bid, but IBM didn't get the bid.  Now it's a solution in
>search of
>an application - same as the alleged laptop/400

How's this for an application: Running an AS/400 oriented MAILING LIST on
an AS/400???








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