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EL said: So we'd be interested in ways in which you and your readers feel we can better market to their existing needs. Reply: For best results, please review several years worth of comments, suggestions, complaints, and ideas from this site. Please don't ask up to repeat what has been said ad nauseum repeatedly.
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The Excitement and the Challenge of Marketing i5
Even if we did repeat it, it would do about as much good. The players change, but the game remains the same. They trotted out IBM marketing types since at least '97 chanting "one backup command". That's it. That's what New York decided the AS/400 is. Real computers are AIX and the Z/90. The AS/400 is simple. They have decreed it from a whiteboard in Armonk, or Somer whatever, or wherever they conjure their imaginary lines in the sand. This apparently stems from our vast Sys/36 heritage. No other coherent explanation for it, not that there necessarily is one. Simplification is a euphemism for getting rid of server hardware and admins. They dance around it a lot, as marketing types are wont to do, but that's their song and dance. Let's give it a spin and see how easy it is to dance to. The alleged simplification is to run several different operating systems on the AS/400 at the same time, those being AIX, Linux, Windows, and, oh yes, something they don't like to talk about called OS/400, otherwise known as "that funny thing you go through to start up our Windows/Linux/AIX servers with partitions on that there C: drive like my PC at home, only they don't call it a C: drive". No synergy between these operating systems, no difference in networking than if they were boxes sitting around the data center, but the AS/400 is pictured in IBM marketing ivory towers as a disk server where precious disk is partitioned out to all these operating systems that we just have to simplify, all these admins running around sucking money down a black hole. Well, one thing not sucking money down a black hole is disk. InformationWeek has an online article on building a terabyte PC for a little over a thousand bucks. Granted, you might want to spring a little extra for RAID, but you get the picture. Partitioning out AS/400 hard drives certainly isn't to save money on disk drives. So it could be to save floor space, but guess what, everybody and their mother is running multiple virtual machines, Windows within Linux, Windows next to Windows, and on and on. I mean, VMWare and the like has been around awhile, folks. So nobody's sitting around going "gee, I wish we could run a bunch of this stuff on one PC. Oh wait, let's get an iseries i5. Then we can do it. We just tell them how many Intel motherboards to stick in there, figure out how to partition that hard drive in there, and oh boy, we're cooking with gas. One backup command. And I'll bet we can even get an IBM Global consultant to tell us what that command is!" What does that leave. Well, it leaves admins. Not just any admin, mind you, but a crew that can handle various incantations of Windows, Linux, AIX, and, oh yeah, OS/400. But wait, you don't need them. One backup command. Now apparently that's a potent command. It must know how to apply patches (that's PTF's for us simpletons) to Windows, Linux, AIX, and OS/400 while it's doing that backup, otherwise you would need those admins, specialists in each of those operating systems. What this has to do with OS/400 is sadly, nothing. I give it between a 4 and an i5, so hard to dance to you can't take it series. rd -
The Excitement and the Challenge of Marketing i5
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The Excitement and the Challenge of Marketing i5
Why is it Unix and Linux is never said to not have a visual interface as the AS/400 is commonly described? It's because they have XWindows which I have read the AS/400 allegedly has, but which I have never heard of anyone using or referring to it as a visual interface for the AS/400. In IBM's zeal to push Linux and Websphere, they would rather pawn the AS/400 off as a container for Linux and Websphere than as the system that runs thousands of businesses, from medium to very large. If I say XWindows, some IBM'er will say run Linux, or AIX, or even Windows, anything but the most advanced operating system in the world. Any other company would actually have some idea that they have something like OS/400 and actually be proud of it, like selling it as the right security and high speed application processing capability against massive data with native I/O for such things as our many, many needed government systems. So I'm going to say XWindows again, and ask why we must endure being told we don't have a visual interface when no other computer system being sold is described as such. Or why IBM would rather tell us to run Linux than OS/400 if we dare ask such an imprudent question. If you really can't get XWindows to run in the advanced OS/400 memory architecture, which I suspect you can't, then why doesn't a computer company with the brains of an IBM actually make use of multiple operating systems sitting on the same box and memory map a shared portion of memory between Linux and OS/400 and provide Linux as a proxy for running visual interface server code with calls from ILE programs in OS/400. Web pages have their function and their place, but no other system is described as having a web page for an interface, and certainly none other described as having no visual interface. XWindows at a minimum is the reason, and not trumpeting at least that as a visual interface for OS/400 because Websphere is what IBM really wants to sell is sad and shortsighted. There should be no difference when firing up OS/400 than people deciding to use telnet or XWindows when firing up *nix. And please note that neither a terminal session nor XWindows is a web page. rdComment
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