First IBM is rarely succesful at eliminating a platform on purpose. they've tried to
eliminat VM (and VSE) many times, Mr. Gerstner thought he could eliminate vm by replacing
PROFS with NOTES - took his corporate EMAIL market share from about 80% to 30% at a cost
of $4B. Made a lot of VM sites go away but luckily that was only one application. But he
did have the power to make the application PROFS (OfficeVision) go away mostly because
Microsoft was so ready to help. and probably lost OS/2 with the same move. The lesson is
that it is the applications on the platform that matter. And applications last a very
long time.
So question: If there was a web/browser interface on z/vm that would support a complete
interactive CMS environment, would that be of interest? It's not that difficult (says the
guy that tells other people to do the work). We already take 3270 CMS applications and run
them with a web interface on z/VM. The real question is what applications would
installations really want to build on CMS and would giving them a browser interfact for
this help or be a waste of resources?
Alan Altmark wrote:
nothing to sneeze at considering those investments are being made at a
time when z/VM's value to IBM is its ability to compete in the virtual
server arena.
As soon as the market signals its willingness to substitute "CMS
application development" where it currently says "large scale
virtualization", then you will get dizzy as we swing the development
engine to focus on CMS. As long as it keeps selling new hardware.
But the market will not signal it's willingness until it sees that IBM
(the owner of CMS after all) is committed to the platform and that they
can be sure it will be around for awhile. Why invest time and money if
IBM is not willing to do so.....especially if the development community
knows that, e.g., there are versions of the new z/OS PL/I compilers that
are available for CMS, but IBM chooses not to release them for that
environment.....?
Well, it's been nigh on 40 years that CMS has been around. Seems like a
committment to me. CMS is here to stay. If all the people with z/OS get
z/VM and [re]discover CMS, who knows what might happen? "Never say die!"
Your post gives the impression that we have a new PL/I compiler sitting
here on CMS that we don't want to ship. If such a thing exists, I've
never seen it or heard of it.
And you'd be wrong, with all do respect...that is not the feed back I am
getting from my young, recent college graduate that I am teaching VM to
these days. Once they get past the 3270 hurdles, they think the CMS
environment is waaaay cool. And the way to get them past the 3270
hurdles is to simply demo to them that the 3270 interface is *exactly*
like filling in a form on a web browser...you can only type in certain
areas, and nothing happens until you click on the 'submit" button...they
grok that right away.
- Re: z/VM usability barton
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