RE: Green Streak -- MIDRANGE-L

Hello Mike,

You wrote:
>If Leif is right, IBM's answer is that I should move to Linux, and then
>when I get big enough I can buy an iSeries (or whatever) to run it on.
>Frankly, I don't see why anyone at IBM would think that was intelligent
>advice.

I don't know how many times I have to say this:  SERVICES, SERVICES,
SERVICES.  IBM is becoming a services company (as in a company that makes
money from various services as opposed to a company that provides service
-- if you get my meaning).  Search the RPG400-L and MIDRANGE-L archives
for previous comments of mine on this topic.

Unix, WinDOS, and anything else you care to name has more services
potential than AS/400 simply because they are less easy to use, less easy
to manage, cost more in the long run, etc.

Mostly this is a management issue.  I have no doubt that most technical
people are doing their best and believe their products are the best (it's
just that so many of them don't know any better so they build overly
complex stuff).  It concerns management on both sides: the customer and
the vendor.

If I am a computer company with 500 people on staff my primary concern is
keeping those people generating revenue.  If I sell AS/400's to my
customers then after the initial sale I never hear from them.   The
occasional upgrade, a few phone calls, etc.  I must constantly find new
customers to keep my staff productive.  If I sell my customers on WinDOS
or Unix then my staff will be doing something for my customers every
second week (tweaking this, fixing that, installing something else).  My
staff are not truly productive but they are charging the customer and thus
generating revenue and that is all a "modern" company is concerned with.

One of Thomas Watson Jr.'s beliefs was "IBM should first take care of
customer's profits, then should take care of employee's profits, and if
those two are taken care of then shareholder's profits will be taken care
of automatically."

What we have now are corporate manager's rewarded with stock options so
they manage the company according to the stock price because that is in
their own interest.  The stock price is a reflection of nothing more than
perceived company profits and as we've all seen recently corporate America
has been lying, cheating, and fraudulently manipulating its books in order
to provide unreasonable profits to the stock market.  I'm not naive enough
to believe this occurs only in America (witness the HIH and OneTel fiascos
in Australia) but corporate America has taken it to all new highs.

I expect shareholders to receive a return on their investment but there is
such a thing as reasonable return.  Corporate America seems bent on
extracting the last cent (nickel, dime, quarter, whatever) for the sole
purpose of keeping a high share price.  The motivating factor is purely
GREED -- and greed is NOT good.  Greed exposes gullibility.  Those two
factors caused the dot-com fiasco and caused the railway speculation
fiasco of a previous era.  Similar boom and bust cycles have occurred
historically about every 50-80 years when sharp and unethical operators
have presented get-rich-quick schemes to the greedy and gullible.  I have
no doubt it will happen again.

How can we correct this sad state of affairs?  By instilling ethics in
management graduates.  By requiring corporations to have a sense of social
justice.  By shareholders demanding better behaviour from the companies in
which they invest.  By companies not employing greedy people as senior
managers.  By holding directors and senior managers accountable.  By
paying senior management commensurate with their abilities and results but
not giving them exorbitant salaries and options.  Is a CEO worth twice
what the guy on the shop floor gets?  Probably.  Is he worth 10 times?
Maybe.  Is he worth twenty times?  I doubt it.

Perhaps that requires too high a level of altruism?  OK, altruism is not
really part of human nature.  Even people who are involved in supposedly
altruistic endeavours are doing it for what they personally get out of it
rather than any actual benefit to the supposed beneficiary.

What we need is for customers to demand BETTER products instead of simply
PRETTIER products.  Customers must realise they've been putting up with
crap and stop.  They must start thinking for themselves instead of the
current practice of 'managing by magazine' and doing whatever they read
about in the popular press.  They must question the marketing spin.

What we need is for IBM management to return to the previous practices of
doing the right thing by the customer and selling them what is best for
them instead of taking the easy path and selling the customer what the
customer thinks they want.  That's not SELLING, that's simply taking money
from a mug punter.

Is this going to happen?  Not in my lifetime!  Read Anthony Trollope's
"The Way We Live Now" which was written over a century ago and compare it
to current behaviour.  Nothing has changed.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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