Re: 5250 to Web Interface / Application Modernization

John,

I agree that Jon and I have been talking past each other. I think that
began late yesterday afternoon (unfortunately). Perhaps I reacted
insensitively to Jon's assertion about my lack of understanding regarding
OA (the interface). I probably should have just protested that.

In regard to IBM i on Power and its future, I have a history and a stake in
that. I became employed by an IBM business partner in 1989 and helped
approximately 200 credit unions migrate off other platforms to OS/400
during the next 8-years. I left the platform and worked on Windows servers
and databases for several years, then got into a partnership with IBM ISV
that had lost approximately 1,000 customers who had migrated off the
platform or were actively engaged in doing that.

Recently I have talked with a number of shops who adopted OA with hope,
spent a lot of money and time, then a year or so later began earnest
efforts to migrate their applications to other platforms. That is
essentially a repeat of the history of many shops that bought into screen
scrapers. My perspective is that this platform needs a significant
turnaround. I don't view OA as meeting the real need.

I appreciate your attempt to referee. But it seems like debates just
devolve in our culture.


On Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 4:04 PM John Yeung <gallium.arsenide@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Nathan, it sounds like you and Jon are talking past each other.

Jon said this, and you quoted it:

I know of many cases (as I'm sure do Profound,
Rocket, Freshe, and others) where the IBM i would probably not be a
presence in the shop any longer if it were not for their products.

Take a moment to digest what he's saying. He's saying that those shops
would likely have moved off the IBM i entirely if not for OA-based
products.

Once that has sunk in, look at your response:

OA offers hope. But if all you have is hope, that's not good
enough. IBM i apps must compete favorably against alternatives on other
platforms, and OA is not getting them to the needed level.

Well, Jon *just said* that OA *did* compete favorably against
alternatives on other platforms; otherwise those shops he was talking
about would have jumped ship to those other platforms.

Effectively, your response amounts to "no, Jon, you're wrong". And
that's not really a productive way to conduct discourse.

If you look even more closely at the respective posts from you and
Jon, you'll see there are enough weasel words to both be right. Jon
said *there exist* shops where OA *probably* made the difference and
saved the IBM i. You said *there exist* shops where switching to OA
resulted in a drop in productivity.

Not only can both of those statements be true generally; it is even
possible, given the rules of logic, for both of those statements to be
true *for the same shop*!

We don't have to go that far, though. Jon talked about a difference
between how OA is "often" implemented versus how it "can" be
implemented. This clearly implies it can be done in different ways,
and some ways could be better or worse generally, or at least could be
a better or worse fit at any given shop. (Could it be that your
"disappointed" shops happened to do OA badly, worse than OA *could*
have been done?) Even if OA were some monolithic technology that has
to be done exactly the same way by everyone using it, I have to
imagine it would still be a good fit at some shops and a bad fit at
others.

But anyway, the reason I'm jumping in at all is really to say that I
don't think IBM i apps have to *beat* options on other platforms, as
long as IBM i is the incumbent platform. (And if we're talking about
OA, we can safely assume this is the case.) This is true of any
platform: The incumbent has an extreme business advantage over other
platforms, in the form of the very high cost of moving to another
platform, no matter what that platform is. It is certainly possible
for this advantage to be overcome; we know from these very lists that
some shops do switch from IBM i to other platforms. But we also know
inertia is very, very powerful.

Fundamentally, Nathan, I notice that many of your disagreements with
people ultimately boil down to philosophical stance. You seem to
espouse the idea that change has to happen wholesale in order to be
effective, or to happen at all. Those you disagree with often are
simply expressing the competing philosophy that it *can*... for *some*
shops... be a better strategy to make comparatively smaller, less
scary changes. It's an argument as old as time, with examples of
success stories and failures for both sides.

John Y.
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