Re: IBM Advertising -- MIDRANGE-L

No,

I think IBM's doing exactly what they wanted to do. It's sometimesrefered to a 'managing the decline of a product line' so as to minimizethe negative impact to cash flow and profits.

Just look at what's happening in the marketplace, the market trends andproduct perception. I think the impact on this product line is ,UNFORTUNATELY, EXACTLY what IBM intends for it to be...and it may even beahead of the curve in terms of things happening faster than IBM wantedthem to. Yeah, it sucks, but it's what IBM wants.

You need to be careful about all that "we're shipping/selling NEWsystems..." marketing crap. You can't base decisions on the dollaramounts of sales only. You need to ask how many UNITS are beingsold and are in the field and how many NEW clients and applicationsare being developed. "New" systems are basically upgrades andreplacements...good luck finding someone that's totally new toiSeries. Yes, they do exist, but so do albino tigers...and it's probablyeasier to find an albino tiger. Now, keep in mind that I'm talkingprimarily about N.American and W.Europe marketspace. In N.Am, we're notseeing anything but market decline.

Frankly, you don't get the MUCH LOST and MUCH NEEDED market impact interms of depth, penetration and acceptance with just a few ads. You haveto do ALOT more. We've all had this conversation many times. I'm notdoing it again. Nothing will happen.

It's time to wakeup and smell the coffee that we in the user groupmanagement arena have been seeing for a long time now.

...and don't give me this 'you can run linux on iSeries, so go buy a (VERYEXPENSIVE) iSeries just to run linux....' :) It was very intersting thatwhen Red Hat did thier Summit tech conference they intentionally excludedPowerPC technologies from their presentations...it was a total Intel basedRH Linux conference for all practical purposes...even IBM was pushingIntel server techno.

Maybe we'll get lucky and IBM will sell off iSeries to the Chinese...orbetter yet Dell.


It's still one of the best servers out there and we all know it!

Don in DC

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On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, GKern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Seems I remember in iSeries edition of eServer magazine back around
April/May, there was an article by Ryan Rhodes titled 'You Ain't Seen
Nothing Yet' regarding the iSeries advertising campaign. This was just
after the few ad's that appeared in WSJ & during a few episodes of Lost.
He claimed that more advertising was yet to come.

So after I read the article I emailed him and asked him the question -
what happened to the advertising? (I never did get a reponse from him.)

My response to their advertising claims is:

"Yes Mr. Rhodes (& IBM) - I haven't seen anything yet."

And I'm still waiting....

So this month I get the latest edition of iSeries eServer magazine with
this slick/fancy poster of the "why i" campaign. Again we see IBM wasting
their ad dollars preaching to the choir...

Regards, Jerry

Gerald Kern
IBM Certified AS/400 RPG IV Developer & RPG IV Programmer
MIS Project Leader, Lotus Notes/Domino Administrator
The Toledo Clinic, Inc.
4235 Secor Road
Toledo, OH 43623-4299
Phone 419-479-5535
gkern@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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