Re: Help required to stop this company replacing their iSeries

Steve wrote:

"Let's hope the new sales managers at IBM, coming from the successful
p5 division of the company, will merge the i5 with the p5 and allow
i5/OS to run in a p5 partition. Overnight that would grow the i5/OS
market to millions? of installed p5 systems and give programmers a
reason to learn to program our system."

I'm not sure I follow the reasoning. This sounds too much like the CP/M 
compatibility cards that were developed for the IBM PC in the mid-1980s. 
That was probably a good idea, but the effect was NOT to extend the life 
of CP/M or for that matter of applications written for CP/M. Instead, it 
hastened adoption of hardware running PC-DOS a.k.a. MS-DOS. Then, when 
users got PCs, they wanted to use software that was (perceived as) native 
to it.

If i5/OS should be unlinked from the Series i hardware platform, the 
scales will tip much more severely toward porting RPG apps to something 
seen as more appropriate to the platform actually being used. That 
something may be Java, but if so then why not just keep running the most 
stable hardware platform in the business?

Very, very few programmers will willingly learn RPG in order to support 
legacy apps running on an end-of-life operating system relegated to a 
partition on another kind of hardware. Regardless of IBM's marketing, 
which is not likely to get any better about changing perceptions against 
the tide, put i5/OS on the p5 and "legacy," "end-of-life," and "relegated" 
will be exactly the labels put on the "i/400." Its demise will stop being 
the wolf occasionally sniffing around the door. His whole pack will be in 
the kitchen with the refrigerator open.

Darrell

Darrell A. Martin  -  754-2187
Manager, Computer Operations
dmartin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx




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