RE: Getting legal! -- MIDRANGE-L

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Clearly, I cannot afford to legally run my machine then.

This is sad considering my situation. I've been developing on the 400 for
around 10 years. When I decided to start a little website, the obvious
solution, to me, was the 400 platform. I bought my old machine cheap,
upgraded the hardware, and it's everything I need for now.

Until this.

Even if I scratch back to a prior release, or even the release that came
with the box, I still don't think I'm running legally. But at least I won't
have license management in my way.

So, in summary, by charging exorbitant rates for software subscription on
old boxes, IBM has missed a chance to add a customer.

This is unfortunate. I would like to be able to run the latest OS, but can't
afford to pay IBM for developing things I don't want and will never use. I'm
not against paying for what I'm using--I'm one of those people that even
pays for shareware. On the other hand, this is a hobby system with no money
being made from it with a potential tools developer working on it, and from
the responses I've gotten here, IBM just doesn't seem to care--except about
their money.

How is it they can get away with sticking your machine into a processor
group, but not adjusting the pricing for age? Don't extremely different
(CPW-wise) machines end up in the same group? Do they want all the old
machines in landfills? This is just silly. They are shooting themselves in
the foot by not supporting the little guy. This isn't Windows we're talking
about. This is a platform with extreme differences in performance and
software should be priced to match.

-----Original Message-----
From: Konrad Underkofler [mailto:kdunderk@hoshizaki.com]
Sent: Monday, July 29, 2002 1:11 PM
To: 'midrange-l@midrange.com'
Subject: RE: Getting legal!


> I know that this will strike many of you as ridiculous, but IBM is in
> business to make a profit.

And to do that they are plundering, raping and exploiting a legacy
market as much as possible. So there are no new customers and new
releases have more changed lines of code than usable features. I hate
to think of the last AS/400 customer (pardon me!) iSeries customer
paying for all the development costs as sales decline into oblivion.
Hopefully the last customer will turn out the light :)

I do think IBM is getting a little better, the "greenstreak" promotion
is nice, but the problem has just fallen a level down. The legacy ERP
vendors and other ISV's are raping, plundering and exploiting their user
base until it dwindles to zero as they ship more "enhanced" modules without
any new features (read bug fixes!).

Hopefully all parties involved can get together on value as a basis for
expense rather than leverage and market position before there is no more
market.

Our last quote to "upgade" our system (ie swap out our 620/2179 for
a 270 2432/1519 dropped us a tier from P20 to P10, cost $60k for the
new hardware and software from IBM...and left us with a software migration
charge from our ERP vendor at $300K with an addition $40K yearly in annual
license fees. I think we have a major ROI issue and a no-go from management
on that one.

Regards

Konrad Underkofler
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