RE: Time to get serious

["Raby, Steve \(GE Advanced Materials, consultant\)" <steve.raby@xxxxxx>]

Hello all,

My two 'aporth for what its worth.

I work with a lot of PC guys, I am told that our AS400 will be phased out in a 
year or so. All the PC guys refer to the AS400 ,no matter how many times I tell 
them, as 'the mainframe' so do a lot of users. Most users hate the AS400 
because the screens are terrible. This actually is the fault of the previous 
administration as virtually all of them are S36/RPGII screens, most have one or 
two fields on and precious little else, so why shouldn't a user prefer a PC 
package that will show him everything he wants in nice colours all at once 
instead of going thru 10 screens and seeing bits at a time? However this is 
where they get the idea of a slow old mainframe. It was a case of people trying 
to save the jobs they knew rather than learning something new, in the end the 
whole IT department (about 8 of 'em) were 'let go' when the company was taken 
over.

Anyway I think IBM missed the boat on the AS400/iSeries like they did on PC's. 
When PC's first started appearing in the UK I worked for a software house on 
the S38, we started developing GUI stuff for front ending the S/38 and we did 
two versions one in Windows 3.11 and one in OS/2. OS/2 was a vastly superior 
product to my mind, but where were the adverts? Why wasn't IBM telling the 
world? Mr. Gates did, and look what happened to Windows. The only ads I saw 
were a couple for OS/2 Warp a few years later, too late then.

Same with the AS400, a few posters in AS400 shops do not sell AS400's to others 
who may not have heard of them. IT themselves are not very good at selling them 
in my experience, telling an accountant that it is better to buy that one box 
for X number of dollars and he will save X number of dollars over the next X 
years does not seem to impress them when they can buy lots of smaller PC's for 
much less and be under his budget this year, or so I have found anyway. What 
should he care if the IT department have major headaches making it work?

I have seen the "Laughing boardroom" ad's and they are good, but does this 
remind anyone else of the horse gone, bolt door, scenario? 

Rommell said about the invasion of Europe that the Allies must not be allowed 
to reach the beaches or they could not be stopped. Well I am afraid that in 
this case we of the AS400 are the defenders and the rest of the IT world are 
moving out from the beach-head. Much as I hate to say it. It may not be the 
end, it may not even be the beginning of the end but it is the end of the 
beginning. (apologies to Mr Churchill for butchering his quote)  :-)

Steve