Re: IBM is so confusing!

Jon,

I did not mean to say that they are the same company or expect them to behave the same. What I am saying is that IBM's customers expect them to provide good development tools. My *opinion* is that if it's costly and/or difficult (or even if that's the PERCEPTION), then they will not attract new development to the platform.

The fact that they are separate companies should be immaterial to the customer. IBM's relationship w/ Zend might be an example whereby IBM takes care of the licensing directly with Zend and the cost is built into the OS.

-mark

At 2/11/2011 05:02 PM, you wrote:

> For all practical purposes in this case, Rational = IBM. The
> divisional / moniker distinction is IBM's doing (for bookkeeping?
> revenue tracking? marketing?), but from our standpoint they should
> lumped together.

Nobody who has ever worked for IBM for any length of time would say this. Rational and the IBM i folks in Rochester are as much separate companies as Ford and Chrysler. They might as well be on different planets in terms of the imperatives that drive them as organizations. I don't think they are unique in that regard - most big companies have this to one degree or another. _We_ as customers see them as a single entity perhaps, but if you expect them behave that way - well you'll just be disappointed time and time again. There are historical reasons for this - for the initial underpinnings read the book "Think" if you can find a copy - sadly it seems to be out of print (Rodgers, William; Think: A Biography of the Watsons and IBM - SBN 8128-1226-3). Management by contention was a deliberate policy introduced by (I think) Watson Jr. to encourage inter divisional competition. It probably served the company well at the time but Gerstner certainly thought it was bad for the compan!
y and killed it. But something so engrained doesn't just disappear even if the CEO says so. I honestly don't think you can ever understand IBM if you think of it as one company. It just ain't that way.