Re: Is CFINT IBM's way of getting rid of RPG?

Oh, please!
This is just plain poorly thought out. For gosh sakes, who could be stupid
enough to think that killing one customer base would create another? Do you?
Yet you assume everyone at IBM is that stupid and somehow IBM manages to say
afloat?

Don't you think it might be a little more realistic that IBM sees that for
the AS/400 to have a place in the market they need to make it competitive
with other hardware in the same market? And that might be why they are
pushing all the new technologies?

And maybe they see they still have room to charge customers higher fees who
are deeply embedded into the proprietary system? See, for years that is why
all the Windows guys called all us AS/400 guys stupid, because they buy hard
drives and memory so cheap, and we pay so much. Now, I like to delude
myself, so I point out to me that this extra money is why the AS/400 is
actually ahead of the marketplace in some technologies. I like to feel that
I get what I pay for. So, when some guy is rebooting his 32bit OS for the
fourth time this week, I feel like I'm ahead of the game.

But IBM has to come up with a way to price if they want to expand the
iSeries into the market that has grown up over the last couple of decades.
There is a huge market out there of people who just aren't interested in
writing green screen code. Plus, it turns out that some green screen shops
want to add non-green screen apps. So maybe IBM sees some writing on the
wall.

And then comes the idiocy, "IBM is trying to kill off RPG by charging more
for..." For heaven's sake! IBM HAS ALWAYS CHARGED A LOT FOR AS/400s!! When
the heck was it ever cheap? But now you see them trying to come up with a
pricing model to attract the new (much, much bigger) market and suddenly
"IBM is jacking up the fees!"

IBM doesn't want to "kill" the green screen, nor do they want to "save" it.
They want to make money. That is why people go to work every day. Lou
Gerstner included. IBM tries to figure out how much they can charge, and
that's what they charge. If it is too much and they lose customers, they
re-evaluate. But if dropping the price means they can't afford to support
their existing customer base, then they see the death of the product.

IBM charges that much because they _can_. Not as a punishment or because
they are conspiring, but because it is what the market will bear.

Chris Rehm
javadisciple@earthlink.net
If you believe that the best technology wins the
marketplace, you haven't been paying attention.


----- Original Message -----
From: "James W. Kilgore" <eMail@James-W-Kilgore.com>
To: <MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com>
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2001 11:48 AM
Subject: Re: Is CFINT IBM's way of getting rid of RPG?


> Folks,
>
> I took this as a tongue in cheek commentary.  The "would go something
> like this" is -exactly- what has been going on.  It is not imaginary.
>
> John Rockwell wrote:
> >
> > Here's a thought.  What if IBM thinks the only way the iSeries can
> > survive is by getting rid of RPG?  The thinking would go something like
> > this.
> >
> >    1. Customers are tied to their legacy applications by the programs
> > they've grown accustomed to.
> >
> >    2. These legacy applications taint the iSeries when it's competing
> > against the latest technologies because competitors dismiss
> >        them as old green screen applications.
> >
> >    3. Most of these green screen applications are in RPG and a lot of
> > the more valuable ones are interactive in nature.
> >
> >    4. Now what happens if we suddenly make a seemingly unrelated
> > marketing change, breaking the pricing of the AS400 into
> >        two separate features, batch and interactive, and then charge a
> > fortune for the interactive segment.  And let's make it even
> >        more interesting by tuning CFINT so it really does succeed as a
> > governor when you move to versions 4.5.
> >
> >    5. How long will it take for RPG and the high price of the
> > interactive feature to be linked together, making new technologies
> >        like Domino, JAVA, et al, more appealing because they
> > conveniently run in batch as far as the AS400 is concerned (even
> >        though this changes the definition of batch a bit)?  Thus through
> > a little sleight of hand the argument changes from language
> >        vs. language (with a company usually having to rely on its own
> > in-house programmers judgment) to an argument simply
> >        over dollars (with a company having more than enough accountants
> > to make a case against the legacy system).
> >
> > Just thinking out loud of course.


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