RE: AS/400 & Native Zip Eng

I hear people bitch about the cost of AS/400 utilities and then spend a
week or more hacking together something rather than buying a packaged
solution that would ultimately work out cheaper. (I think Simon Coulter
made a similar point earlier). The cost of software for your AS/400 is
simple economics. There are not as many buyers of AS/400 utility
software as there are buyers of PC utilities. To recoup development
costs (which can be higher - cost of machine/compiler etc) software
developers have to charge more.  Furthermore, AS/400 users expect higher
levels of support even if they only paid $100 for the product. You're
right, the solution you've put together is overly complex and more
difficult to automate. PKZIP/400 from ASI used to be a lot cheaper than
it is now - somewhere in the $500 range - but people still complained
about how they could do it for free on their PC and expected to pay
about $50. So ASi went the other route and raised prices, aiming their
software at users who appreciated the simpler solution. The business
they lost was business they didn't really need. This is a curious
phenomenon that we've noticed too: the more you value your solution the
more the customer will too. Oh, and one more thing...when we sold
software in the sub $1k range we had a real problem with customers
actually paying us, now that we're selling higher priced solutions that
problem's gone away. 
Tim  


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bruce Odum [SMTP:bodum@magicnet.net]
> Sent: Saturday, March 20, 1999 11:45 PM
> To:   MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
> Subject:      Re: AS/400 & Native Zip Eng
> 
> No I am not putting my programs in qsys. I just would like to see some
> basic
> utilities that are ported to the as/400 operating system that are in
> the PC
> world that don't cost us thousands of dollars.  We have a web site
> that we
> build reports for out customers and send these reports to the ifs web
> directory.  It would be nice to compress these files using native CL
> programs and then send them to this folder.  I looked at this program
> before
> and at that time it would not compress files on the ifs from the
> native
> operating system.  Even if it did the cost is way to high.  It is hard
> to
> tell the CFO after you spend a half a million dollars on a computer
> system
> that you have to have pay 4 times over or even higher for software
> that runs
> on other platform.  In my opinion this is what kills the 400 market.
> Take a
> look at datamirror for one. Compare the cost of the product for a
> other
> databases or just NT then look at the cost for the product on the
> AS400 it
> is a joke.  This goes back to the simple task of compressing a file.
> My
> choices are to pay a hi price for software or buy a P.C. dedicate it
> to
> client access have a job run on the 400 that will trigger it to
> compress the
> files on the 400 for distribution.  This is way over complicated and
> now I
> have to justify another machine.  Some times the little things are
> what
> counts.
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Don <dr2@cssas400.com>
> To: Bruce Odum <bodum@magicnet.net>
> Cc: <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
> Sent: Saturday, March 20, 1999 10:09 PM
> Subject: Re: AS/400 & Native Zip Eng
> 
> 
> >
> >
> > On Sat, 20 Mar 1999, Bruce Odum wrote:
> >
> > > Great but I still think IBM should supply a basic zip function for
> the
> IFS
> > > that can be accessed by programs in QSYS
> >
> >
> > I'm hoping that you're not putting your programs in QSYS....
> >
> > As for a zip routine on teh IFS, why not just plain ole standard
> PKZIP or
> > WINZIP?  IFF you're thinking of ziping as/400 objects (other than
> data),
> > you're better to crtsavf, savobj/savlib>savf, then ftp...it's my
> > understanding that this zip util does a conversion to ascii...which
> for
> > pgm/system obj's and packed data is a problem...but then, I'm just
> > starting to look at this...
> >
> > Don
> >
> 
> 
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