On Wed, 4 Dec 2002 13:40:48 +0000, Alan Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Wed, 2002-12-04 at 07:29, John Alvord wrote: >> What a hobbiest license would do is make it possible for z/OS and z/VM >> to survive the coming retirement of 80% of all the experienced >> programmers. By creating a very inexpensive training/development >> environment, IBM would make it possible for that market to continue. > >Maybe IBM don't care ? Whats the business value of doing new stuff on it >as opposed to new platforms ? The only thing I can see is helping to pin >customers to their proprietary hardware and increase the value by upping >the cost to switch that defines the actual price they can charge. > >That assumes customers are dumb .. which I guess makes it a good >investment The cost to switch is already very high. There is an amazing inertia to production computing workloads. Once value is being delivered, think payroll, the cost of moving to another platform is gigantic. There are billions (litterally) of lines of COBOL/PLI/Assember code out there in customer S390 shops doing supposedly useful things. And in the US at least, payroll is HARD - it changes each year, is different depending on work location and sometimes by where the person lives. Reporting requirements, benefits, vacation, sick days... whew. [ Digression: my spouse was a DP consultant in one of her jobs. One place had run into a brick wall - the monthly batch processes were taking more than a month, and there was no money for upgrades. Over a period of weeks she made a paper map of all the batch processes - on a conference room wall. In the end she found enough deadend processes, ones that produced data that was unused by humans or programs, to eliminate a week's worth of processing. That bought them a year's leeway before upgrades were needed. I bet there is a lot of that going on...] One other poster here talked about the monumental effort to move workloads to a new platform. After 10 years, about 20% of the workload was about to move. And we have all heard of the failures. I am sure it is equally difficult to move significant workloads off VMS, Tandem/nonstop, Apache, etc etc Imagine what happens when most of the IBM Mainframe savvy programmers retire. Talk about the Y2K problem... Computing on demand only solves part of the problem - getting the system programmer talent to manage the systems. Some workloads can migrate to service providers (payroll to ADP or competitors). But what about the billions of lines of application code. Whose fingers will be typing to update for that next new requirement? john
