Without knowing what your day-to-day role is, it's hard to say. First, simply by not being in denial. Mainframes are not better because the people who use them are older, the boxes are bigger, they were around in 1979, and all of your professional peers work on them. Mainframes are not better because we all know they're better, and that's that, and anyone who disagrees with me is obviously one of "them."
Second, many of the participants on this list, myself included, work for (directly or indirectly) IBM or a software vendor. We have a direct or potential influence on speed, cost, ease-of-use, reliability, and security. If you work for an end-user company, then you have some influence on, for example, the ease-of-use of your systems. I often hear on this list a defense of obscurity: "why would you want to change how JCL works -- it was good enough in 1968, it's good enough now." That is not a productive attitude. Face it, the mainframe is in many ways user-hostile. We are the people who invented the cult of the unapproachable IT guru: "authorized personnel only." Changing those attitudes would be a good step. And some things cannot be changed. Better to work to advocate intelligently for the use of mainframes for the tasks they are good at, than to operate in denial of the fact that it's not the best choice for every computing task, or every company. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stephen Y Odo Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 3:18 PM To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Just another example of mainframe costs. Charles Mills wrote: > expertise and budget, you can't sell people what they don't want. If people > are buying squatty boxes, it must be because they offer some benefit. And my > larger point was that we will not succeed with mainframes by denying the > capabilities of other boxes, but rather by recognizing those capabilities > and competing with them. OK ... but what I'm hearing from this list is that the "squatty boxes" are faster, cheaper, easier to use, just as reliable, and just as secure as the mainframe. how do we compete with that? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
