Re: Happy i5/OS 2008?

Trevor,

It seems to me that the very fact that you need to keep shouting the new name(s) from the rooftops over and over, with (apparently) very few absorbing the info, should be quite telling. The market seems to have shunned the new names. Now what? Yell louder? Ridicule those that don't like it? We still need to identify this box and / or OS to the people we speak with. Most don't even know the machine at all. Out of those that do recognize it, I have yet to come across someone that knows it by its new name. NOT EVEN ONE!!! I try to tell them, but no one is interested. It also really slows down (read: hinders) a presentation when unfamiliar buzzwords are used.

IBM has picked poor names (on many levels) for this system and then, adding insult to injury, has not properly gotten the word out / marketed the product. Is the end result a surprise to anyone??


1) The new naming (whether we like it or not) does little to promote the machine. It's the applications available, support for legacy applications, new capabilities, reliability, etc. that sell this machine. It's the pricing and several other factors including, but not limited to items such as the lack of an easy to program, integrated, system supported GUI and IBM's wishy-washy marketing that hold this machine back from selling.

2) If the bulk of the IBM Midrange faithful can't keep up with IBM's naming mess, then how do you expect the public at large to keep up with it?

3) Your comparison to Intel actually works against you. Let's look at some of their (consumer) chip line.
8088

286
386
486

Pentium
Pentium II
Pentium III
Pentium IV

Dual core
Quad core

Notice a pattern? There is a simple, yet progressive way that the chips get identified. The names are easy for the consumer to remember, even when a new one comes out; III is better than II, IV is better than III, etc. IBM for the most part has NOT done this.

BTW, kudos to you for getting up there and promoting it, but the naming morass is a very small part of the problem that needs to be fixed by IBM. Yelling at the supporters of the system will not do it.

-mark


At 12/31/07 09:44 AM, you wrote:

While I am trying to celebrate a NEW year, I just received an email from
lab400.com offering me a promotion on iSeries education.

This seems to be a little at odds with all the industry luminaries
represented on that site. How many of them support i5/OS as the OS of
choice, yet associate themselves with a brand-new ³iSeries² promotion? It
seems to me that while it is almost a new year, most of our industry lives
in a world of AS/400 and iSeries worship.

How can i5/OS have a future if the so-called proponents (yes, you) are still
calling it something from the past? Sure, the legacy of the AS/400 is
incredible, and the iSeries continued that legacy, but those are not
commercially available from the vendor, and have not been for two years.
Neither of those platforms can compete with the current System i server and
i5/OS offerings.

Why would we want to continue to promote something that is out of date? We
talk about Windows having the same name, but regardless, no one is proposing
that we go back to Pentium chips from Intel in 2006 now that we have
Dual-core and soon-to-be Quad-core. Is it simply that our loyalty to
something amazing (AS/400) keeps our blinders on and prevents us from
understanding how incredible the latest servers are? Or is it pure
stubbornness so that something as simple as a new name means we cannot get
past ourselves and we propagate the death of the platform?

It is about to be 2008. From all expectations, the server will no longer
matter to i5/OS in the very near future. i5/OS is what we all have in
common, and that is what IBM is currently selling. Whether you think that is
a good decision or a good name does not matter ­ IBM is selling i5/OS. Sure,
IBM support struggles with the name. IBM documentation lives in a
past/present kind of world. But, when someone asks what platform you work
with, and you say AS/400, you just represented yourself as someone who works
in the last-century. Not only is it the 21st century now, but it is almost
the end of the first decade. Isn¹t it time that we represented ourselves as
having the best OS on the planet, running on the best hardware and CPU on
the planet?

The AS/400 is dead. Long live i5/OS. Welcome to 2008.