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

Colin,

1) Cheaper development costs. Giving DDS the ability to generate HTML, for example, would make development effort considerably less.

2) We can claim that "it's in there", the same way we do when discussing database, security, journaling, LPARs, etc. That is very different than "yeah, I suppose that's doable."

3) We don't have extra 3rd party layers to deal with for a necessary, very integrated function. I realize that we can eliminate some of that overhead by rolling our own versions, but I think that that's the wrong approach for this functionality.


The overall benefit is that the people promoting the system in the field would be able to sell it without the usual "isn't this that really old system?" or "is that thing still around?" and instead tout both its strengths and how it presents. Then we can start out at the very least on equal footing to the competition and hopefully ahead. Right now, we're way behind.

Yes, there are GUI tools and screen scrapers from both IBM and 3rd party vendors. I've played a bit with a few. There were quite a few drawbacks which made them either not practical or just not good enough.

-mark


At 2/18/09 06:06 AM, you wrote:

Mark,

What exactly would be the business benefit to either IBM or us as customers
of the 'native gui' over and above what we already have?

On 17 Feb 2009, 9:36 PM, "M. Lazarus" <mlazarus@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

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 re...
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 t...
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