Well said.
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Buck Calabro
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2013 1:11 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Anybody know the record for the longest an AS/400 has been contiuously up?
On 3/15/2013 1:32 PM, Winchester Terry wrote:
Since the article was referring to uptime, I was referring to that
aspect of Windows. If you wish to tout the fantastic uptime of Windows
that's your perogative.
Let me try one more time. Not to convince, but to explain why this is apples and oranges, and why it's more important to build IBM i up than it is to tear Windows down. Windows is here, used by many more millions than IBM i. The opinions of those people are important to us in the midrange arena because those are the very people we serve.
That universe of people has business problems they want to solve. They don't buy Windows PCs because of uptime considerations. They buy Windows machines because they can do things that handle their business needs. There isn't a business problem for which '3700+ days of uptime on a single box' is the answer.
Taking the opportunity to rag on 'Windoze' because it doesn't stay up for 3700+ days is unhelpful because it pits Windows against a standard for which Windows isn't bothering to compete. It's like reading a Windows forum complain that the AS/400 can't run his carefully crafted .NET code. It isn't meant to.
These sorts of comparisons don't help us to do what we MUST do in order to survive - convince management to spend money on midrange servers and software, including programmers(!) in order to solve their business problems better than any other hardware/software combination. Because, like it or not, we ARE being compared to cheap, commodity hardware and free/cheap open source software. By shrugging off Windows, we are denying ourselves the opportunity to proactively solve our end user needs - which by definition include doing things the way the end user wants. Which clearly includes Windows desktops.
If you also choose to run your business with it...I wish you the best
of luck :)
That's like saying 'Good luck with that horseless carriage idea.'
Windows servers, which handle billions, if not trillions of email messages, file server requests, print requests and web pages every single day are already running the business.
However, as a desktop system, yeah it's "ok" but my next home PC will
be a fully loaded Mac...based on a more stable *NIX system.
Not IBM i, because IBM i isn't intended for that space. Windows on commodity hardware isn't intended for the high availability (3700+ days of uptime) space, either. Which makes the unjust comparison an excuse to bust on Redmond; something that happens a lot here. Think about it:
We're telling the rest of the organisation that the platform they've chosen to run their web, email, print and file serving needs - Windows - sucks. That their judgement is suspect. How does this help us try to convince them to spend budget money on the midrange?
Of course, this forces me to bow down to another monopolistic oriented
company...but I digress...LOL
One could easily build a PC out of commodity parts and load an open source OS like Linux or OpenBSD. Most people choose a commercial PC with a commercial OS because of the convenience factor. This is an important lesson for us in the midrange world. If we make things less convenient for our end users, they will go elsewhere for their computing needs.
--buck
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