Hello Holger,
allow me to add my hobbyist view to your rants. :-)
Am 07.03.2020 um 02:42 schrieb Holger Scherer <hs@xxxxxxx>:
* regardless how cheap you try to make an offer for developers (or admins) to jump into the system, it's always too expensive for some of them (we had a EUR 69 deal some time ago)
Nobody wants to buy a cat in a sack. If I were about to learn a new system, I also would be reluctant to pay a monthly fee until I really know that I'll stick with it. I've a Sun U1, a DECStation (VMS) and a SGI O2, mainly collecting dust because of that.
* when someone new to administering an IBM i rents a dedicated LPAR and starts peeking around, they loose interest and stop using the system after some weeks. IBM i is too complex (not complicated) to simply do learning by doing on a test environment without a practical job to be done
This is not true for administering only but also for "having" a system in general. When I got my first model 400 for free in around 2007, I was trying to get the hang of this incredibly interesting system. Interesting, because it "felt" so much different than anything I knew before. But after a while, the same problem kicked in as with machines described above. What should I actually *do* with them, besides booting, tinkering a round with the OS provided tools and shut them down again? This also made me lose interest for a couple of months.
Until I came up with the idea that for continuous interest in a system, I need a "killer app". Since I was still basically interested with OS/400, I decided to get into programming there. I started to code my radio tube collection management around 2010..2011, when I acquired my 150 (since the 400 had no LICKEYs to use SEU or compilers) and did my first complete inventory run in late 2011.
If I didn't start this still evolving project, I probably would still have my 400 just as a very effective door stopper, occasionally IPLing and shutdown like with the machines mentioned above.
* the effort in time to support new IBM i users (pgm or adm) can be very hard, in average we invest about 50-70 hours a month without getting money for that. Sometimes we get a "thank you". A lot of people seem to expect to get help from us instead of trying to use $search-engine
How do you cope with such requests?
* very interesting: there is a lot of people wanting to learn administering IBM i; almost same number than people wanting to learn programming the i. To be honest: we need 10 times the programmers than admins to keep the system seen in the market. We need programmers with keen projects (language is not a topic to discuss) and talk about them.
Maybe this stems from a basic interested in this mystic command line, introduced through the now nearly omnipresence of Linux? On non GUI platforms, especially servers, the line between admins and programmers is somewhat blurry. To automate admin stuff, shell scripting is a skill, many Linux/UNIX admins develop out of necessity. From my own experience (and from watching others), automation tasks can become arbitrarily complex, and soon you're encountering to deal with $ and ' in variables in Shell scripts. Time to learn something which fits the job better…
So, I guess administering a command line based system includes a certain amount of programming. And just programming as a system isn't very helpful without a certain amount of sysadmin skills.
* The IBM i system and market is for business. It's that simple.
Yes, that's IMO one of the biggest, hm, obstacle to make the system known to a broader audience. The system can be used for other tasks, too. However, its strength is clearly classical database based processing, which isn't necessarily limited to business applications only.
And their understanding about computer systems is "they run". If you try to tell them about reliability differences between Win, Linux and i, their technical understanding usually stops after the first minute :)
Isn't that what sysadmins are for? Keeping the system running?
I guess your point is that business administration students are "just" taught about the business side and how to properly juggle with numbers, right? But they're not necessarily taught about available tools to achieve this juggling better, less error-prone and less time consuming.
* We get a lot of feedback of people who used pub400 for starting exploring the i;
[…]
We also would be glad if these people spread the word about i in general.
For a while I was one of them. :-) And I spread where I can. But as Jim pointed out in his initial message, you can't just rush into best buy (or equivalents of available in other countries), and just get a complete system. And you can't just click together a system on the IBM website, pay them and get the readymade system delivered. I once had a chance to have a look at an order and just the mystic specify codes with their numerous interdependencies would be a big hindrance to make an easy buy.
I'd add that it's hard to find "generic" applications for i, along with pricing. Or offers like (for example) JTL does: Free merchandise management system, paid support. Maybe keep documentation sparse… to help generate revenue from support. :-)
It's somewhat clear that a software market as huge as Windows has established is inherently confusing and overrun. Hundreds of applications for a certain operational purpose is far form getting a meaningful overview. But a nice market system like IBM i additionally suffers from getting an easy overview about available solutions at all. That individual websites offering solutions rarely list prices doesn't exactly help the situation. It's all about enabling the customer to have a chance to get an overview, and compare.
I guess that stems from the time and habit that from early on, including the System/360, IBM customers were required to program their applications themselves, because there simply were none.
So, what can I do? I tell people, start to raise interest and maybe get a chance to show them a few examples what can be done. I can (and do) help other fellow hobbyists to get their boxes running. I try to (slowly) finish try-as400. Maybe enough of them get the hang on programming the box. And even less of them might start a (second) career as a developer. Maybe that's helping a bit, given fractions of fractions of the *huge* amount of people living on this planet might equal to "some of them".
What could I do to actually help in a commercial sense? Hey, dear customer, buy an IBM i system instead of shiny new windows servers! But I can't offer reasons beyond "to me it's a really cool designed system". Real customers demand monetary benefits from such a decision. Telling them that the stuff almost never breaks but you have to buy the actual greatly oversized hardware, pay 10,000 € yearly license and hardware maintenance fee and maybe program the intended software to actually help running their business themselves… well, aside from real enthusiasts like the indian pizza shop you mentioned, most customers will decide you're actually completely crazy and get advice from someone else. :-)
* running pub400.com makes some work. But to be honest: would anyone of you run a Linux or Windows box open to the whole internet with ability to create and run programs? ;-)
Clearly: No. Because it's so very easy to have such a machine being abused by people interested in just abuse to spam, hack other machines, and whatnot.
There once has been a public VMS machine, the Deathrow VMS cluster. As I see just now, it's gone. 410. :-)
https://deathrow.vistech.net
I was thinking about offering accounts on my 150 (running 24x7 anyway) but I fear my skills to tighten security enough to prevent abuse to the most extent possible aren't sufficient.
now leaving for bed. 02:42am here
Thats what I thought after finishing my last comment ;-)
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