IMHO: What Will It Take to Turn the System i Around?

[mollykj]

IMHO: What Will It Take to Turn the System i Around?

Get off your "fluff-stuff" rump and take a REAL look at GUI apps - TRUE GUI apps, not that crumb called cgi-rpg. They DO IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY - by reducing MISTAKES (humans make mistakes-even programmers) and by making the information available easier to find, read, and understand. ASK ANY 20-something hired by your company that has been forced to learn green-screen apps. And its not just because everyone has Windows on their desktops and knows something of Office apps that GUI applications are easier than green-screen to use effectively. So if other languages make it easier to develop GUI frontends and allow the backbone structure to function in RPG (IV or free, who cares!), which is the most efficient business-oriented language for use on the iSeries, then why not have IBM make those other languages available in Websphere ? Why re-invent the wheel that is already rolling-over IBMs marketshare ?

[Steve.Kiferd]

IMHO: What Will It Take to Turn the System i Around?

I am not sure if it is okay to post a link or not. If not then you can delete it. However antecodes like this are a primary reason the platform hasn't found a new customer base and continues on with the same lathargic customer based content to run 15 year old ERP software and code using RPGIII. Sure there are some progression IT departments out there, but they are few and far between. http://www.angustheitchap.com/Angus/...s/Weasels.html

IMHO: What Will It Take to Turn the System i Around?

When IBM swiched to marketing iSeries thru their business partners, they abandoned customers and "potential customers" leaving them to deal with smalll business, sometimes involved in less than professional approaches. This shift in marketing on leaving a stellar line of IBM hardware and know-how was a critical error on IBM's part and is the reason the iSeries is lossing ground. This group is driven by $$$ to survive and has not contributed to the growth and longevity of iSeries in today's arena of fierce platform competition.

IMHO: What Will It Take to Turn the System i Around?

I fully agree that IBM has not sold its products very well; but why should the I Series be cluttered and changed into working like a PC? If you need a PC, get a PC. If you want to write in Visual Basic or C, do so. Do not ruin the ease of operation, the security of the box, the ease of writing good business applications just to make it like very other product on the market. The actual user doing their day to day tasks, does not care if a little man pops up and makes a funny face. They need to accomplish their jobs and get information quickly and easily. That is what the RPG language does. The fluff has been over-sold and management seems to be in love with it. It does not make their employees more productive and that is where they miss the target. It is easy create a robust program and is only limited by the programmers imagination. Free-form is ok if you gain some sort of productivity. I have work to get out everyday to make the people I work with more productive. I see no point in changing something if there is no benefit. I use pop-up boxes and lookups with in the application. I can fax a document, use a word document and enter data all from the same program. I can make a change very quickly. I design my applications in a modular design which makes them easy to maintenace. This takes longer on the front end, but pays off when business needs change. I keep my business processes clean and lean. This makes them easier to modify. If a programmer writes sloppy code, it does not matter what language they use, it will still be sloppy. If a programmer is not innovative, it does not matter what language they use. We should not lose sight of the fact that our programs are used by people that must have information and information put into our systems. I do not wish IBM to make RPG just like the other languages. I want enhancements that I will gain some productivity and that will give more options to the people I work for.

I agree with much of what John says in this article. Both IBM and the iSeries programming community have become lethargic and complacent. In the meantime, Microsoft's juggernaut has continued rolling along, introducing one innovation after another and gaining market share. We in the iSeries world are now minority players in the development world. I am a long time professional in the midrange arena and I have been repeatedly disheartened by IBM's failures to make the iSeries a true developer platform and to promote it. John's comments about Websphere also ring true. One would believe that Websphere is being widely accepted and utilized in the iSeries world if one only listened to the hype in the journals and the froth coming from Common and the other conferences. At the last iSeries Devcon and Common conferences I attended within the past year, I only encountered a few people out of all the attendees who were using Websphere instead of the old PDM environment. The Java usage was somewhat better. The issue of SQL is also a sore spot. SQL on the iSeries is still cumbersome, although IBM's implementation of SQL is the superior one in the IT world, both from a standards compliance point of view and features. IBM could do much to remove these limitations and make the iSeries a truly dynamic environment for developers and users. It will take more than giving the platform a new name, which has served more to create confusion with the 3 name changes in a few short years. It will also require more than renaming RPG to a new language, which is the curent topic of discussion. IBM truly needs new blood in their sales force. Perhaps they should go outside the corporation to find people who still know what it means to sell a product instead of arrogantly expecting the development and user world to come to them. Mitch Lax Senior programmer/analyst Titan America LLC Norfolk VA mlax@titanamerca.com