Re: Interactive tax eliminated - considerations

I have not seen cheap anywhere except here. I have not even seen pricing at all. There is more then one way to eliminate the interactive tax. One is to include the same 5250 CPW as the batch at no extra cost (and this seams to be what most are assuming), another is to raise the cost of batch to what the interactive CPW sells for, another one is to go some place in the middle. It would help if we knew the numbers of how many non interactive iSeries IBM sells. If it is a small percent of iSeries sold and IBM figures that a high percent of customers would of bought another eServer type from IBM and only lose a small percent to another vendor. They may see no point in keeping the lower cost high batch CPW iSeries.

And what about third party software vendors. They have the same options plus dropping the iSeries as a platform for their software, or going just user based. I did not hear of any jumping on the green streak promotion and dropping the price of their software.

Now for my own personal interest I hope IBM sets a fair price and that third party vendors stick with the iSeries and come up with a fair price (server or user based).

I would think seeing how IBM does the pricing will give some incite into IBM's plans for the iSeries. A low price and it has hopes for the iSeries, a high price could be one more strike against it.

John Ross

At 12:11 PM 1/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:

What are the ramifications of "cheap" 5250/QINTER support?