Well said!!! Laura Schneider, DCIO, TSSCD, DMSB Rural Development U.S. Department of Agriculture 4300 Goodfellow Blvd. St. Louis, MO 63102 Phone: 314-457-4922 www.rurdev.usda.gov
-----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of John Gilmore Sent: Tuesday, June 04, 2013 11:40 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: To recompile or not recompile, that's the question Gerhard Postpischil wrote: <begin extract> I think that IBM has no tolerable choice in this. Clients have major investments in functional software, and I can't see them rewriting solely for modernization, and I cannot see IBM forcing the issue. </end extract> and I am sure that he is right about how most of IBM's mainframe customers view this issue. What also needs to be understood is that these views are very odd ones indeed. Applications do not begin to stink so soon as fresh fish, but they do not age gracefully. As they age maintenance costs for them rise sharply, and this has a peculiarly unfortunate consequence. Force-majeure maintenance, made necessary by changed regulatory and reporting requirements, absorbs all of the available resources. Not much is left for new or enhanced features, and in the upshot the users of these old applications come to view the IT departments responsible for them as unresponsive to their needs. I have never encountered an application more than ten years old that did not have a bad, musty smell; and the crackpot realism that avoids revisiting them is killing the mainframe. z/OS is a superb vehicle; the hardware on which it is executed is many orders of magnitude more reliable than anyone's PCs; the uses being made of these facilities are mediocre or worse. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN This electronic message contains information generated by the USDA solely for the intended recipients. Any unauthorized interception of this message or the use or disclosure of the information it contains may violate the law and subject the violator to civil or criminal penalties. If you believe you have received this message in error, please notify the sender and delete the email immediately. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
