Re: Cause and Effect Reversed?

[Don <dr2@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 30 Sep 2000, James W. Kilgore wrote:

> Rainy Saturday morning rant:
> 
> One of my system bibles is "The principles of systems" by J. W.
> Forrester.  It is a text that studies closed and open loop feedback

(snip)

James, what you're refering to is a paradigm shift that we're seeing in
the market and that is already underway on other platforms.  Due to
several reasons, people are changing their thought patterns from a
hardware centric to application centric focus.  I did a minor epistle on
this to the interlug listserver(user group mgmt listserver) back about a
month ago. 

Fast going are the days of when people think hardware and o/s first.
Quickly coming are the times when people think something like "I run my
business with Oracle, MAPICS, etc., " vs "I run my company on a I400..."  
And with the slowly merging of platform non-dependency, you should expect
to see the surviving software packages to be able to run on multiple
platforms.  (Remember you heard it here first, not from the Gartner
groupies:).  People will buy software then plop it on the most affordable, 
available and supportable hardware and O/S.  

The interesting thing here is that IBM still doesn't get the picture
because there are people coming to us telling us that they're buying
brand-x (non-IBM) because frankly it's cheaper and easier to get past the
bean counters...

IBM's statement of direction is that they will sell you a "box" and then
you load on it what you want (Gerstner '95?).  And then I would expect 
that they would phase out or spin off the software business that isn't
making the margins that Sam, Bill or whomever wants...we're seeing some of
that already...  (Gerstner's current contract ends 4/1/02).

Unfortunately, IBM's market plan and strategies for the AS/400 series has
been a joke.  For some really stupid reason they think that they can
depend on "business partners" to do their marketing for them...and we all
know the reasonS why that was doomed from the get-go.  If you REALLY wanna
know what I think in this area, read my 3rd "State of the Midrange" at
www.wash-midrange.org.

Right now, my 3-year old wants to play marbles, which is a paradigm shift
I can enjoy alot more...:)

Don in DC... 


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