RE: RDi vs SEU (was: Standard source file names?) -- RPG400-L

What's wrong with the Pacer?

On my first date with my future wife we went to Raiders Of The Lost Ark.
When we got to the movie I handed her the door handle so she could get the door open.

Yep, she thought "This is the man is must marry!"

The pacer sealed the deal!!

-----Original Message-----
From: RPG400-L [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dan
Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2015 8:51 AM
To: RPG programming on the IBM i (AS/400 and iSeries)
Subject: Re: RDi vs SEU (was: Standard source file names?)

You loved your Pacer? An AMC Pacer? Really?

SMH.

- Dan

On Wed, Apr 1, 2015 at 6:31 PM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 4/1/2015 5:30 PM, John Yeung wrote:

I don't have the exact time frames to hand, but there was a
multi-year period when IBM bundled all the compilers and all the
development tooling into one price. If you bought a compiler you
got all the other compilers, SEU, PDM and WDSC all together.

One thing I still am not sure I ever found a concrete answer to:
Back then, did they actually LOSE MONEY compared to what they would
have gotten had WDSC been a separate-cost item?

If the answer is yes, then, well, I guess I really can't make much
further argument about the WDSC bundling experiment. If the answer
is "no" or "there's no way to know" then for me, the question is:

OK, so then what's wrong with a low adoption rate?

Nothing, per se. The low adoption rate speaks only to the fact that
this market genuinely feels that SEU is Plenty Good Enough. That's
not the case for me. If we had XEDIT (also green screen) instead of
SEU, I might not have switched to RDi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEDIT

I maintain that the issue was never about the cost - everybody pays
for SEU and SEU is pants. The issue was never about SEUs superior
capability because the most primitive version of Code/400 had regular
expression search, colour tokens, sane copy/paste keys, lots of code
on the screen - SEU never had even those minimalist functions. So why
did they not try something else - something IBM was pushing? Because
SEU is Good Enough for what they do. Now, with this as a working
hypothesis, what has changed about that population cohort that would
cause them to move from SEU today? Because that cohort doesn't even
bother with the
90 day trial and if we like car analogies, who would turn down 90 free
days in a Tesla S? People who like their AMC Pacer, that's who.

Don't get me wrong; if one likes one's Pacer and that Pacer does
everything one asks of it, and one brings home the groceries with it,
one may never miss how the Tesla feels, and that's perfectly fine.
But that's not me. Much as I loved my Pacer, I need something a bit
better; at least something with airbags and a trailer hitch.

If you (or IBM or whoever) cares about adoption rate, and you're NOT
losing money, then why NOT just put it out there?

If I remember it correctly, the issue was that customers who wanted to
keep on using only RPG, PDM, and SEU wanted cheaper licences - in
effect, they wanted to stop paying to develop Cobol and WDSC when they
weren't going to ever use either.

In other words, it was a political-marketing decision, not an economic one.

--
--buck
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