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From: Colin Williams
Let's say IBM touted a native GUI offerring tomorrow, how much
would you be prepared to pay for that?
If it's not already clear, I'm not calling for IBM to come out with a native GUI. When folks call for one, most the time I don't know what they're talking about.
But to answer your question, I get the drift that they don't want to pay anything extra for it. They want it bundled with the OS. Recall Mark asking why anyone would pay extra for TCP/IP, for example.
They want OS applications like WRKACTJOB to use the same GUI and menu and programming interface that they'd use for a purchase order application. Back to the good old days, if I understand correctly.
For what it's worth, I agree with you that with respect to our own applications, we can do the same thing without IBM. And I'd add that even with all the whining, IBM doesn't have the incentives to deliver one.
One of the big players in the K-12 software market also happens to own Prentice-Hall and other major textbook publishers. Schools are begging for textbooks and curriculum to be made available in electronic form, but they don't want to pay $95 for each copy of a PDF file even though they may pay that much for a book with a hardbound cover. So the software side of the company resists the call for electronic curriculum, because it would undermine their publishing business.
That's kind of like the forces at work in IBM. Their ecosystem is build around Java and related middleware, so they resist certain types of technology.
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