Re: OS V6R1

Hi Mark! I don't want to belabor the issue. It doesn't make sense to argue; it is what it is. Let me just respond to your thoughtful points, though.

Joe,

Your reasoning sounds great. There are a few "on the ground" issues to overcome.

1) When a long standing pricing model changes, usually the vendor feels like they would make more money using that method. It's the customer that's paying more.

This one I don't get, but the point is that with the old pricing model Rational was getting zero. That's unsustainable. It would have been nice if some of the ADTS license could have been siphoned to Rational and RDi was just bundled in, but that didn't happen.

2) By your logic, even you would be OK (ROI wise) if IBM charged three times the current rate, right? All you need to do is change "Does RDP save you 20 minutes a week?" to "Does RDP save you 1 hour a week?" to justify it! I don't think that reasoning would fly in too many shops.

Actually, that does fly in a lot of shops that pay over a thousand bucks a head for some of the advanced development tools. Have you priced RAD? It just doesn't fly in i shops where we've traditionally paid for our software at least partially by the vast markup on hardware. With hardware dropping to commodity pricing levels, that margin is gone.

3) The vast majority of basic development tools from IBM over the history of the IBM midrange (at least from the S/34 on, that I can think of) were bundled together. When that changes you can expect major resistance from the people that hold the keys to the purse strings.

I don't remember it that way. In fact, for the longest time you had to buy the COBOL compiler separate from the RPG compiler. I could be wrong on this, but I think bundling is a (relatively) new phenomenon, at least for the compilers. Not so much for ADTS, although you did pay extra for things like ADM. Infoprint server is another add-on, isn't it? Even the new "Open Access" is an additional price product. There's a lot less bundling going on in the i - back to the future!

4) The "one time cost" claim is not really accurate, since unbundling allows IBM to directly and separately base maintenance fees on the list price, which is ongoing.

I was talking incremental cost over ADTS. The bump from ADTS to RDP is only the one-time cost, because both require the maintenance, right?

Joe