Re: IBM is so confusing!

On 2/10/2011 2:18 PM, M. Lazarus wrote:

Joe, Buck,

I'm not following this reasoning. It is fairly well established that
RPG is the primary development language on the platform. I don't know
statistics on the runners up, but Cobol is probably the next most
popular. Putting exact numbers on it is futile. Why?

1) IBM needs to produce development tools for RPG, Cobol and other
languages, regardless of the exact numbers of users. Otherwise, the
platform dies.

They've done that, in multiple variants. The market overwhelmingly
prefers SEU. IBM gave away Code/400, they gave away WDSC and few were
interested. What should Rational do now that they /know/ the GUI IDE
market is pretty much a desert in the IBM i / RPG market space?

2) If IBM does not enable the system to *easily* conform to current
standards (native GUI, browser interaction integrated with existing
languages, web services, etc, as just a few examples), the user base
will continue to erode. The cost to develop this should come under
banner of "advertising, marketing and continued viability of the
platform." It's currently under the "Well, if they really, really beg
us we'll do them a favor, but they'll pay for it dearly..."

WDSC and the various follow-on packages coming out of Rational are
intended to do exactly this. As for the 'pay for it' part, the market
didn't exactly adopt WDSC when it was free. I can understand Rational
trying to recoup development costs for this new stuff.

3) If IBM would spread out the costs over all OS purchases, it would be
a very small bump. Instead, they are surprised when fewer than expected
are successful in convincing management to spring for a cost they never
had to pay for before. As a consultant, I can rarely walk into a shop
where they have RDi. And if a few chosen programmers are allowed to
have it it's usually considered a perk. Whether it makes sense or not
is not the point. The point is that this cost model is make it more and
more difficult for companies to stick w/ the i, let alone get new
customers.

IBM DID spread out the cost across all OS purchases and it gradually
dawned on them that they were spending money to develop and maintain RDp
for an extremely limited audience. Look at it this way, if IBM were to
push Smalltalk for years and only a few dozen IBM i shops used it,
should IBM keep developing Smalltalk for i or should they abandon it as
an unprofitable experiment and reassign developers to something that
makes money - or at least satisfies more customers?

This is probably our last chance as a market to influence the decision
makers at IBM. If they don't see a revenue stream, they're going to
conclude that it was good while it lasted and all good things must end.
It won't cost them hardly anything to put RDp on caretaker status and
let developers keep using it without further investment in enhancements.
Look at SEU; it is essentially unchanged from the day it was delivered
on System/38, yet many thousands continue to be very happy using it.
IBM isn't making product decisions based on a few emails on a list
server. They make decisions based on measurable profit and loss.
--buck