Re: an interview with someone from the new IBM

Steve Richter wrote:

http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/20/talking-to-one-of-ibms-top-strategists/

check out the commenters. They love IBM. Me, I notice the IBMer does not
mention any software that IBM is creating itself. It is all about searching
for what others have done, making it enterprise strength, and I guess
selling it with an IBM label on it.

When did IBM mgmt lose confidence in the ability of its own employees to
write great software? IBMers had done a good job creating ILE. But mgmt for
some reason halted any followup improvements.

Steve:

I assumed that the "IBM Venture Capital" part of Drew Clark's background pretty much formed the basis of why there was a slant towards outside software in the interview.

In my experience, a _lot_ of "IBM" software has been developed outside of IBM for a long time. It used to be much more obvious. WAF/400 for example was almost blatantly an adaptation of some banking/financial package. (The irrelevant database fields with names like [CreditCardNbr] were clues.)

Also, software such as PHP can be adapted and made available years sooner than if it _had_ to go through all of the internal development necessary for full integration, the degree of integration that we expect under i5/OS. It might be that the current offering will be superseded some day by a truly native release; but in the meantime, we don't have to wait.

And if a supersede is never needed... what's the point of spending money on it? I'd much prefer effort being funded elsewhere.

I think we look at interviews such as this one and see what we expect.

Tom Liotta