Re: George Farrdeclaresfeaturespecificpricingonhorizonfor WDSC

I can see I have hit a sensitive spot with you John, but in 
my defense I have only been a contractor for a couple years 
now.  I have lived where you are living.  You must also 
understand that every shop that I go into may not have the 
money for the things that I am in support of, which will 
inevitably mean I will not be able to use the WDSC tooling 
when working for them.

Aaron, what I take issue with is the disingenuous argument that IBM has so
far been providing WDSC for free. Nothing about the "I" is free. We pay
premium prices for everything related to the box. By perpetuating this
fallacy, it just encourages IBM to continue down the path of breaking off
functionality that we've already been paying for, and charging extra for it.

The whole idea strikes me as nothing more than the creative packaging of a
price increase. Think about if for a minute; if you have the following
features (example):

- WDSC RPG Toolset
- WDSC Java Client Toolset
- WDSC Websphere Toolset

I'm sure you wouldn't believe for a minute that revenue would be split
amongst the development groups based on sales. If that were the case,
Websphere & Java would be dead in a year. The fact is that sales of RPG
development tools would continue to subsidize Websphere development, just as
they have been for years. So how's that different than the situation we
already have? It's not.

Am I drinking WDSC Kool-Aid?  Maybe.  I have drank Java 
Kool-Aid before and thrown it up years later.  I think the 
reality of the situation is this: No money to pay developers, 
no second-to-none tooling.  Am I fine with most of what I 
have today in WDSC, yes.  But they (WDSC dev team) might be 
able to raise their development to the next level (concerning 
feature sets) and if that costs me more $$ to get it in 1yr 
vs. 5yrs then many would say it is worth it.

If they need more development dollars, a price increase could be done within
the existing packaging. We don't need to move to a nickel & dime model for
that.

My previous employer is making a grand switch to .NET.  Wanna 
know why?
Tooling/Software.  Plain and simple.  Microsoft has some 
pretty nice integration amongst all of their products and I 
can see why the decision was made.  What if IBM would have 
had the tooling available to them two years ago?  They 
wouldn't have had to introduce an entirely new development 
environment into the scenario which costs a lot of $$$.

They're not alone. We're heading in the same direction. And it's not just
the quality of tooling. It's the quality of the tools combined with the
reasonable cost of them. A part of me almost wishes IBM does start cranking
up the prices again. Right now we're teetering on the edge of the
cost/benefit ratio with respect to the platform. The only reason we're still
on it is because of the high cost of switching ERP packages. If pushed over
hard enough, we'll be able to finally justify the cost of replacing ERP, and
that'll be the end of i5 in our companies; and along with it, the end of
being bent over & fleeced.

Regards,

John Taylor