IBM, as a profit-making corporation owned by stockholders and presumably incorporated somewhere within the USA, has a legally required fiduciary duty to its stockholders to maximize the value of their stock. There is no such required fiduciary duty to sysprogs, the homeless, downtrodden, political refugees, or any other class of people on earth. Nor is IBM required to maintain any allegiance to the USA, support its wars, or recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag at its annual stockholders meetings. Any stockholder who feels strongly enough about these other concerns is free to propose his enlightened ideas to the rest of the stockholders at their annual meeting. If enough other stockholders also want to help the droves of underemployed sysprogs, then they can demand the appropriate changes from top management.
Freedom and free competition are two-edged swords. If I want my employer to have the freedom to sell a software product that induces its purchasers to eliminate huge numbers of salaried employees and I make my living from such software, then I ought not complain if other businesses also have the freedom to compete in such a way that I lose my job, assuming no coercion or fraud is ever involved (which, of course, makes my argument irrelevant in the human realm). I am not happy that IBM will someday do something to end my software development career prematurely if they possibly can, if that makes them more profit. IBM will beat anyone or anything into the ground that its top management feels is necessary for IBM to continue its highly profitable existence. They have done so in the past with large competitive businesses (NCR, RCA, Amdahl, e.g.), and so now they are doing it with sysprogs. To paraphrase the Hyman Roth character from Godfather part deux: "It's not personal. It's business. This is the business that we chose." I still maintain that if IBM makes its mainframes installable and maintainable by a partially trained chimpanzee, then it will cost a customer a lot less money to hire one full-time chimpanzee than a human, thus making the total cost of ownership to the customer lower, thus allowing more customers to obtain such mainframes from IBM, which can still make its profit by not lowering their charges to their customers. No one needs a telephone operator any more to make a local phone call. Even a chimpanzee can do it. And now anyone can afford to own his own phone. Bill Fairchild Software Developer Rocket Software 275 Grove Street * Newton, MA 02466-2272 * USA Tel: +1.617.614.4503 * Mobile: +1.508.341.1715 Email: [email protected] Web: www.rocketsoftware.com -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Liberatore Sent: Friday, November 13, 2009 6:57 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: IBM driving mainframe systems programmers into the ground U got to love greed or is it capitialism ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
