> Getting out of the zSeries analysis biz or just pushing it onto the back > burner?
Probably getting out of it eventually. My fellow webmasters would recoil in shock if I suggested there was something more difficult to deal with than Google - but IBM's lawyers take the biscuit for incompetence, arrogance and sheer rudeness. The two major factors are the departure of the PCMs - who wants to know which to choose when there's only one - and the realisation of On Demand technologies. There are now no other vendors interested in what IBM is going to do next with its mainframes. I haven't had a serious study question from another vendor for a year or more. As a proportion of the total computing market, it's miniscule. You know, in the old days it was important to buy the right machine. If you bought a /158 and found it too small, you either had to buy another one or sell it and buy a /168. Either way, there was a serious hit for getting it wrong. There isn't any more. And the MIPS tables have been pissing me off for some time. Modern workloads are so complex these numbers really are pretty useless. It amuses me immensely when people say: "I don't use the Isham tables, I get mine from xyz." Where do you think THEY get them from? There's a bit of mileage in optimising software charges, but with Software Group running round doing audits and sending retrospective demands - yes, I've seen one in Europe - that's not much fun either. I'll leave that to Al Sherkow - there isn't room for two in that market and the lad does a good job. There are fewer users, too. The VSE license base has declined by over 40% (sites) in the last five years. I believe in most geographies IBM's sales of z890s and z9s have been below half of outlook in recent periods, in some places even lower. It's nearly three years since an IBMer I know and respect sidled up to me and asked what I thought critical mass might be. IMO we're less than two years off. And on another tack - I too have an ape story. We took our children (about twenty years ago) to Frankfurt Zoo. This was an old-style zoo - all concrete and the pens just big enough to let the animals turn round. They were actively running it down, following the London Zoo/Whipsnade model. It was siling and the gorillas were all inside. They had a relatively spacious tiled enclosure, raised a few feet above the public. The silverback sat at the front, arms folded with an inscrutable grin. The rest of the family were spread around behind him. I stood in front of them and wondered who was really on show. One of the females was gently grooming a juvenile, cuddling and embracing a bit. All of a sudden the juveline laughed, slapped its knee, poked the female and pointed. She followed the outstretched finger to look at whatever the juveline had spotted, and laughed herself. I never saw what it was, but it obviously amused them both immensely. "Hey, Mum, look at THAT!" -- Phil Payne http://www.isham-research.co.uk +44 7833 654 800 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
