RE: The future of RPG (was DIM question).

Richard,

I don't consider porting VA-RPG and Baby/36 as valid attempts... they don't
demonstrate the power of a complete solution we have with iSeries.  Showing
them to school kids is doing more harm than good.

Hmm... others won't look at iSeries because it runs Linux.  They're used to
run it on cheap hardware that is everywhere available to play with.  If they
would even want to look at iSeries, they would first of all need to buy an
expensive machine.

Server farms, LPAR, ... it doesn't make much difference.  15 Linux
partitions on iSeries still have to be managed as if it were 15 on separate
PCs.  The fact that they run on the same hardware makes the risk even bigger
for disasters.  Also LPAR (apart from Linux indeed) makes the whole machine
as expensive as several ones (if you ever configured LPAR configurations
you'll know this).

IBM has the tools, but if they're that (euh... Code/400 ?) good still needs
to be proven.  One thing is for sure, they aren't the easiest ones, and far
from consistent.

The GUI is the major problem in all this... and I doubt that any of them
really addresses this issue.  If it does, I would love to see a sample
application from IBM demonstrating this.

Kind regards,
Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard B Baird [mailto:rbaird@esourceconsulting.com]
Sent: 11 March, 2002 15:01
To: rpg400-l@midrange.com
Subject: Re: The future of RPG (was DIM question).



Paul,

>Joe and others,
>
>Reading all this must really upset most iSeries customers !
>
>1. Porting... while the general idea is how you can attract customers, and
>keep them for the rest of their live, IBM is trying to get rid of them in
>providing an easy migration path ?  Not realizing that migration will also
>be to another platform as they're much more up-to-date with technology
than
>ported solutions on iSeries (ie. Tomcat, DNS, ...).  If they really want
to
>port something... that they port OS/400 to Intel !

The porting issue is a red herring.  I don't believe it is a strategic goal
of IBM.  I haven't seen that in any changes, recent or planned, from IBM.
It's all just speculation.  Besides, it's been tried.  over and over again.
(va-rpg, ansi, baby36, etc.) without success.  why would they try again?

>2. Where a healthy company would exploit its good products to a maximum
(ie.
>OS/400), IBM is trying to replace it with an inferior OS called Linux just
>because there's a hype surrounding it.

I think just the opposite is true.  they are exploiting OS/400 by making it
more flexible - able to 'host' other operating systems.  Linux on iseries
is not an attempt to make current iseries customers switch os's, it's an
attempt to make others take a look at iseries for the first time.

>In addition, they don't realize that
>much cheaper hosting platforms do exist for Linux than iSeries.

Not if you've got a server farm.  you won't convince the room full of
administraters that only one of them deserves a job, but you might be able
to convince thier boss's.

>3. While we have a productive UI (ie. 5250, no matter how you look at it),
>IBM is studying how to force us (high taxes on interactive workload) to a
>less productive one (ie. HTML) that lacks today's interactivity a customer
>is used to.  (Even M$ realized this and is selling Windows Terminal based
>solutions like crazy in Europe).

The interactive tax IS a problem.  It's ibm attempt to price the iseries
attractively to new business, while retaining it's profit potential from
old business.  Time will tell if this is a big mistake.  But it doesn't
mean they are leaving us behind.  Take us for granted?  maybe...

<snip>

>Conclusion... if IBM would invest the money in iSeries itself, and not in
>solutions to move away from it, we might have had a completely different
>picture.  Unfortunately, now we are way behind (as usual with IBM) to
>exploit our advantages.

The fact is, IBM has given us all the tools - websphere, va, code, all of
them cutting edge.  The problem is that gui is inherently unstable
inefficient and not condusive to heads down data crunching.  The problems
you site for gui on the 400, all have the same issues on a windows server,
when scaled to where we are used to.

>Kind regards,
>Paul

ttfn,

Rick

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