RPG Training

Nathan Asked:
"most of my interactions with IBM are very positive. Did you have one that made you feel threatened? Or like me, do you just sense a trend?"
 
Hi Nathan
You answered your question in the earlier part of your comment.  You wrote,  "And they clearly are pushing their own business applications, more and more." 
 
I agree with you.
 
Once you get through to an actual IBM employee, the people are very knowledgeable & the service is excellent.  It's the getting through part that is difficult.
 
When I started on the S/38, I actually knew local IBM employees.  They invited us to seminars and training sessions.  They showed us how to use RPG, CL and DDS.  They wanted us to program on their machine.  That changed in the 90's.  I can't say why.  If I speculate that IBM just finds it more profitable to sell services rather than hardware and that IBM would prefer the AS400 to simply "go away", then some people say that's a paranoid point of view.
 
The truly ironic thing, however, for IBM is that they pushed java, HTML, SQL and just about everything else besides RPG.  So we've learned it.  And we've mostly left the AS400.  We had 4 of them, and now we're down to 1.  Cheap pc servers for us and $ that used to go to IBM, now goes to Microsoft. 
 
Yeah, I definitely sense a trend. 
 
So, since this thread actually started when someone asked about RPG Training, I would advise them not to bother.  Learn something else, anything else and work on pc.