Re: Discontinuance of support for the *M36

At 08:22 PM 05/03/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>  It would seem that IBM is again looking to abandon the small business 
> customer in the IBM Midrange arena.  I am referring to the apparent 
> discontinuance of support for the *M36.
>
>This move is puzzling for two reasons:
>
>1)  The costs to IBM for supporting this feature must be relatively low, 
>since it's considered to be stable.

This probably costs more than you think, because many of these customers 
lack the necessary AS/400 skills, so they need an excessive amount of 
customer support.


>2)  The "experiment" to push S/36 customers over to the AS/400, when the 
>AS/400 first came out, failed miserably.  Why would IBM want to go through 
>that embarrassment again?

The S/36 customer represents small potatoes to IBM, and if it doesn't 
generate profit, they don't care about it.


>  The primary impact of this move is going to be to small businesses, the 
> ones that have managed to retain their functional S/36 code.  They are 
> traditionally the ones to be the "least squeaky" wheel.

Profit, profit, profit, that's  all IBM cares about.  Gerstner's primary 
objective is to increase profit as much as possible, to increase the 
stock  price.  To achieve this marvelous (e.g.: greedy) achievement, IBM no 
longer gives a flaming @#$% about customer sat or anything else except 
profit.

IBM used to be a company that retained a lot if intellectual capital that 
did not show on the balance sheet.  The primary directive today is to shed 
anything that doesn't make money and generate profit.  Keep in mind that 
IBM paid for Lotus paid for Lotus by depleting the parts inventory at your 
local IBM parts center.  So the next time your system is down, and they 
have to fly the part in from Rochester (or wherever), you can thank Lou for 
the downtime.

I've said this before, and I'll say it again.  The day Lou quits, sell your 
IBM stock, and sell it short.

Al

PS:     Because of this braindead action on the part of IBM, look for them 
to keep selling the current line of hardware with V4R4 for a long 
time.  Maybe if people scream loud enough, they will bring back the *M36, 
but they would call it the *M36e, because anything with a red "e" on the 
end of it is cool now-a-days.




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Al Barsa, Jr. - Account for Midrange-L
Barsa Consulting, LLC.  
400 > 390

Phone:          914-251-1234
Fax:            914-251-9406
http://www.barsaconsulting.com
http://www.taatool.com

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