Re: what was the single mgmt decision made in mid-1990s. period

At 2/17/09 01:24 PM, you wrote:

<snip>

> Their entire VAR / Business Partner model, which I recall going
> way back, is based on the realization that IBM is NOT good at
> the application stuff, so why not team up with the professionals
> that ARE good at it?

You should meet the new IBM. They have been quietly, but systematically buying application development firms and building their custom technology group, and moving much of their development operations overseas.

When you say "development", does that mean OS or end-user application development? I haven't seen any indication that IBM has made a move into the space that is typically handled by BP's.

That's not to say that IBM doesn't vasillate back and forth, appeasing business partners when they see fit, but their tendency is to move steadily into space that business partners previously occupied.

I have no doubt that if Rochester were to convert IBM i to a native GUI, the platform would take off. But at what cost? Who would license RDI-SOA? Who would need Websphere and all the configuration and performance management services that accompany it?

One of my points is that IBM's pricing model needs to include the things that we expect to be included. Otherwise, the platform becomes old, obsolete, stale, from a practical standpoint. In this case, they could even put it in marketing column, since it's a key point in trying to sell the system.

We can and have shown IBM a long list of anecdotal evidence to support our case for a native GUI. I don't understand why it hasn't been implemented 10+ years ago!

If we are to buy into the "IBM needs a separate revenue stream from all or most of the pieces of the OS" philosophy, then why wouldn't they start charging for DB2, RDBA, the query optimizer, journalling, save/restore, save/restore w/ compression, TCP/IP, encryption, and many other OS services we have?

The simple answer is that there is a baseline of integrated functionality that we rely upon to develop and run our applications. That's what makes our system more robust than most other systems. The baseline is a moving target, since the industry is forever changing. When IBM stops changing either in parallel or eve *ahead* of the industry, then the system's sales (both to new and existing customers) starts to drop. That's what seems to be happening. And that situation gets exacerbated by a poor economy.

-mark