Charles Mills wrote:
My wild guess would be something along the lines of 2 (although I would not
be privy to the information if 1 or 3 were the root cause).
The costs of the FLEX program are obvious: the time of all of the people
involved, and the (theoretical, but very measurable) loss of revenue on VERY
deeply discounted hardware and software.
The benefits are harder to measure: the benefit of having a bunch of small
vendors.
Perhaps the small vendors are just not strategic to IBM. It's easier to deal
with a modest handful of large players than a passel of large, medium,
small, and tiny players.
This seems to be the case with IBM education; they used to hire
out a variety of instructors as sub-contractors (including yours
truly from time to time). Now they have narrowed the contractors
they deal with to a dozen; if you're a small guy you have to have
an affiliation with one of the dozen; and these guys pay peanuts
and keep the markup.
---
BTW, has anyone else noticed IBM-main posts coming across
with lots of trailing newlines? At first I thought it might
be the trial version of CA Security Center I'm working with,
but it seems to only be IBM-Main (e.g.: see the end of this
post)
[well, i tried to show it but got rejected for too much
quoted material - most of which was all the newlines]
---
Kind regards,
Charles
-Original Message-
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf
Of Warner Mach
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 6:09 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: IBM vs Flex-Es - Why?
I do not have any direct stake in the FLEX-ES vs IBM issue, but
I have been surprised that there does not seem to be much speculation
on why IBM is dropping the FLEX-ES connection; just complaints that
they are doing so ... Is the reason only known to a few IBM
executives?
.
To fill the void, I offer the following speculative reasons:
.
1. Complaint: Fundamental Software is doing something that IBM does
not like ... This is probably not the reason, because if it was IBM
would state it.
.
2. Economic: The IBM bean-counters have made a cold calculation that
they would make more money if Flex-Es was gone. Maybe having a lot
of developers out there causes competition for IBM tools software(?).
Maybe IBM would make more revenue by forcing at least some of the
folks who now use Flex-Es to buy 'real' hardware(?).
.
3. Legal: The IBM lawyers have decided that the company would do
better in court if they adopt a simple 'no emulation' stance. In that
way they can better confront any attempts by competitors to sell
emulated mainframes.
--
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
303-393-8716
http://www.trainersfriend.com
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