Examples: See Lynn Wheeler's many postings on SNA, TCPIP, FICON, etc., etc. His stories will tell you a lot more than I can. See also the FBA-vs-CKD debates and histories, with MVS+CKD always the winner. See also the (several) deliberate cutbacks and staff reductions over the decades for VM and VSE development staff and repeated increases in VM+VSE pricing because VM+VSE shops had most of the functionality of MVS at less than half the price and requiring less than half the systems staff to monitor, maintain and upgrade. Any threat to MVS profits was always the loser. As a result, there are almost no VM+VSE shops left in the Americas, though I am told there is still a customer base left in the Euro zone.
IBM never seems to have acquired or internalized the value of the concept of a loss leader. It really is OK to have products you lose money on when they bring in more business overall, but IBM is famous for disposing of any money-losing product to maintain the corporate philosophy of always (and only) being in high-margin businesses. OK for executive bonuses I guess but rotten for customers who may actually like and/or need the losing products. As for COBOL, at the moment I agree with you, sight unseen. I am not in any position to even ask for the new version of COBOL (though I do expect to see it in my shop sometime in the next year), so I have no chance of testing anything, but I will be very curious to see the actual results when it arrives. I was, as you indirectly accuse me of, engaging in speculative conspiracy theories about the robustness of the new backend for COBOL. It really is not very hard to do because IBM provides so much ammunition with which to do it, and it is thus very hard to resist. But I will desist in this particular speculation until I can see it for myself. Peter -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Timothy Sipples Sent: Thursday, July 11, 2013 1:06 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: Future of COBOL based on RDz policies was Re: RDz or RDzEnterprise developers Peter Farley opines: >They [IBM] have, time and again, shown themselves quite capable of >deliberately reducing the effectiveness of new technology to preserve >their revenue stream for a few more quarters. Examples? I'll offer a counterexample: the System/360. IBM led the electromechanical tabulating and accounting equipment market, and the System/360 utterly destroyed the very market IBM dominated. The System/360 was either going to be history's stupidest act of corporate suicide or one of history's most brilliant business successes, depending on how it turned out. More recent examples are obviously more relevant than older ones. No points awarded if the examples have other plausible motives available. By the way, this question has just been answered for COBOL. Enterprise COBOL Version 5.1 is available, now. Turn on the new compiler optimizations and measure the results. They be good. In my opinion it's delusional to think IBM would invest huge sums and many years developing (and shipping!) an entirely new backend for a product it didn't believe in and that it didn't expect to sell. Utterly, completely delusional, with absolutely no sense of reality -- business or technical. In my personal view. Sometimes people post conspiratorial stuff here and then I think, "That individual is not rational in thought." Maybe others' experiences are different, but I haven't persuaded many people to act when I present an irrational argument. They just look at me funny and say something like, "OK, that's very interesting. Thank you for sharing." I've learned to be a little more thoughtful in trying to understand the world, rationally. I applaud IBM for Enterprise COBOL V5 and recommend others do the same. Well done, and more, please. -- This message and any attachments are intended only for the use of the addressee and may contain information that is privileged and confidential. If the reader of the message is not the intended recipient or an authorized representative of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by e-mail and delete the message and any attachments from your system. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
