RE: Some fodder for marketing, perhaps

Excellent point, Tom.  At one point EVERYBODY subsidized the development and
maintenance of twinax support.  This made sense back in the day when
everybody used it.  IBM then slashed the price on the server boxes as they
headed towards commoditization of the hardware.  We're not quite there yet,
though, and they decided they needed some additional revenue and decide to
get it from the interactive users.  This both served as a very rough way to
implement a per-user fee while at the same time pushing the customer base
towards server-based systems.  In any event, it wasn't a surcharge imposed
on interactive users, but rather interactive machines didn't get the same
degree of cost reduction.

As twinax is phased out and we lose some of our other hardware uniqueness
(and benefits), you'll see the price drop further.  There will be other
costs, costs that will bring us more in line with other platforms.  For
example, the loss of IOPs means that you'll need more horsepower, and to
date iSeries CPU cycles are still some of the most expensive cycles in the
industry.

Anyway, those of us who bandied the phrase about in the early days (IIRC,
the first one to use the phrase was Don Denoncourt when he and I were
discussing my servlet/JSP front end architecture) did so specifically to
raise the negative context; little did we know that it would stick so long
and be used to incorrectly by so many <grin>.

Joe


> From: qsrvbas@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> 
> Before the "interactive tax", AS/400s were more or less all priced
> similarly. There wasn't as much distinction between the 'server' systems
> that had zero/minimum interactive and the systems that sold with a lot of
> interactive capability. When the big price difference came about, it
> wasn't exactly by IBM suddenly charging _more_ for the interactive systems
> and leaving the price point for 'servers' where it was. It came mostly by
> IBM drastically _reducing_ the price point of 'server' systems. (IIRC)
> 
> So, it wasn't by adding a "tax"; it was by slashing off a big discount.
> Those that didn't need it didn't have to pay for it. Is that concept
> different for unix vendors?