The Wheels Are Turning

[M.Savino]

The Wheels Are Turning

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Well, in that case.... I think we should start a rumor. I like: Intuit buys IBM !! Can anyone top that one?

[Guest.Visitor]

The Wheels Are Turning

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Well, I "heard" Bob is completely abandoning RPG in favor or Java, his true passion. In other words, Bob is retiring. Or maybe the i5 is merging with another hardware line and the AS400/iSeries/i5 will be phased out. Or maybe the i5 is getting a native GUI interface!!! Chris

[joe.baumgarten@gmail.com]

The Wheels Are Turning

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Just focusing on the price tag is the wrong approach. Would you pay $1000 for a dime-store bic lighter? What if you were stranded on a deserted island and this lighter could light up a fire that would save your life? It is incumbent on the software vendor to "paint" the value of their software to the prospect so they can easily see the ROI of their investment. Is is incumbent on the internal champion to help paint this value as well. After all, they are the ones that have to go in for the money. I once helped a prospect do this to the point where said "Now I can go in to my boss' office with this proposal STANDING UP. Every other time , I go in on my hands and knees."

[nandelin]

The Wheels Are Turning

** This thread discusses the article: The Wheels Are Turning **
Bob, You and I are facing some of the same challenges as small independent tool vendors in a market dominated by companies with huge brand recognition. My initial plan to promote Relational-Web [which includes a developer toolkit] through my own Web site didn't work. My fallback plan to join the staff of a larger iSeries ISV is beginning to bear fruit. We're using Relational-Web internally for development and deploying runtime components at customer sites, which provides some revenue for me. Perhaps more importantly the runtime components are being tested and proven in production environments. Most of our customers don't have developers on staff [they rely on us to support our applications], but the few who do are asking for a Relational-Web developers license. It's a beginning. Nathan M. Andelin.

[demillerva]

The Wheels Are Turning

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Bob, you appear to be barking up the wrong tree. As a programmer I was always very concerned with maximizing my personal productivity. I tried numerous times to get my employer to invest in additiional software of various types when I was convinced of the ROI. If it wasn't already in the budget, faggedaboudit!! If I tried to get it added to the next budget cycle it was always cut out. If you ask me, no manager I have ever met has the slightest clue what "productivity" means. As a matter of fact, the one really good third party productivity tool we had was BIM Edit from the B.I. Moyle company -- (I was working in a mainframe shop at the time). When told to tighten up on the budget our IT management cut out the very nominal annual maintenance fee that this was costing us, forcing us to go back to ISPF, a vastly inferior code editor. The real problem is short-sighted managers.

[David Abramowitz]

The Wheels Are Turning

** This thread discusses the article: The Wheels Are Turning **
demillerva stated: The real problem is short-sighted managers. As you state the case, I will disagree. Your manager had just so many dollars to work with. The allotment of the budget had nothing whatsoever to do with sight. Another manager would have kept the tool maintenance, and replaced the programmer with an outsourcing firm. Dave

[H.Boldt]

The Wheels Are Turning

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Bob: First, I'm sure most people have noticed that you yourself are in the business of selling a particular $1000 add-on RPG library. Some might view your editorial as a shameless piece of self-promotion. But I won't dwell further on that point. You wrote: "I often wonder how long in the iSeries marketspace, so called "free examples on the Internet" will last when the people behind these things are also trying to make a living." You brought up the example of Scott Klement. There's also David Gibbs, who, as you know, hosts for free the most popular and useful set of iSeries related mailing lists. Here are some other examples in the wider computing world: Consider Perl, which is arguably the most commonly used language for CGI programming. It's available for free, along with many related packages. If I started with $1000 and downloaded all the packages I wanted from CPAN, at the end of the day I'd still have $1000 in my pocket. (And $1000 can buy me some nice model trains!) There's a lot of great stuff available in the Perl world. How do they do it? Why do they do it? Consider Python, perhaps my all-time favorite programming language. The standard distribution of Python contains an incredible wealth of functionality. It too is available for free, along with many useful class libraries. A couple of weeks ago, I wanted to create some PDF files. I downloaded and installed ReportLab, and within a half hour, I had my PDF's. Again, all without license fees! How do they do it? Why do they do it? I could go on and on with examples, including one particular freely available, Posix-compliant operating system. Bob, I don't want to tell you how to run your business - you, of course, have every right to plan that yourself. But I think you're missing the boat here. Instead of earning income for a few hundred xTools licenses, if you made the software freely available, it could be running on potentially hundreds of thousands of iSeries machines. You could then make money selling support contracts. Even if only 1% of installs resulted in a support contract, you might still come out ahead. Furthermore, with Cozzi's xTools running on so many machines, your reputation within the iSeries community would increase, resulting in more book sales and education sessions. (There's another approach that some businesses take. They charge license and support fees for the current version of their software, but make the N-1 release available without support for free.) Bob, please don't take this the wrong way - I mean this as constructive criticism only. But in my humble opinion, your current business plan (asking $1000 for xTools licenses, $25 for rpgiv.com access) has the potential of making you look like a greedy money-grubber. Look very closely at the other examples I mentioned, and try to understand how and why they do what they do. Cheers! Hans

[Guest.Visitor]

The Wheels Are Turning

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I thought everyone had heard... i5/OS is being released for the Apple Mac platform in January 2006.

[Guest.Visitor]

The Wheels Are Turning

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Bob, There are conflicting goals. First, as a programmer/developer, I am told that I need to continue learning new things. So, if I need to find out about and use api's or user spaces, I would rather do it myself to learn about it. Once I've learned it, I'd rather use a tool. As one travels through a career, one uses more tools. But, the reinventing never stops because I always need to learn something new. If we always used tools, we wouldn't be very knowledgeable. Second, budgets are king. This has already been discussed but when a manager is looking at cutting, tools get axed quickly. Thirdy, we are becoming cheapskates. Worldwide we are in a giant race to the bottom. People want to pay little or nothing for everything. Today, free is good and anyone that wants to charge a fee for software is viewed as "money grubbing" as someone said earlier. Eventually, we will all pay nothing for everything and we will all live in grass huts and grow our own food. When it comes to computer systems, companies are willing to pay for the machine and OS but that's about it. The low cost/free mentality is so prevalent that books and magazines are no longer considered budget items in most shops. Fourth, programmers try to justify their existence. If I can convince a boss that I can write a tool and keep the item off the budget, I justify my worth to the boss and get a little ego boost that I can write code "just as good as Cozzi". I actually had someone tell me that recently. I'm not a boss but was working in a shop questioning why they had home-grown utilities. Fifth, computers and software have become commodities. My 1 cent worth. It used to be 2 cents but nobody's willing to pay that anymore with the prevailing "Walmart mentality". Respectfully, Tom.

[Guest.Visitor]

The Wheels Are Turning

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It actually wouldn't even require a search engine, a good function index of modules would greatly improve the process. Give me a list of descriptions for DATE related modules or CUSTMAST related modules and the ability to review their parameters and I sould be able to select the desired module in a few minutes. We have the tools but often don't bother using them; shoemakers children all!

[nandelin]

The Wheels Are Turning

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Hans, Consider that if IBM were to license OS/400, and all its developer tools for free, and only charge for hardware, how unit sales of iSeries systems would skyrocket! IBM might also forego any contrived gimmicks such as characterizing the 5250 interface as hardware, supported by an "interactive feature" card (most customers know that 5250 is a software feature). This would free IBM of the image of a money grubbing corporation feeding off the intrinsic value created by others who build and deploy applications using the 5250 interface. A move like this may have the short term consequence of cutting the iSeries division's margins to zero, but consider how it would rejuvenate independent software developers who are building tools and applications for the platform. You may think this is a stretch for anyone to suggest this, and you're probably right, but it may be useful to illustrate a problem endemic of our society and culture in general, which is the idea of promoting the exchange of something of value for free. If Bob, for example were to take your suggestion to provide his tools for free, and thereby increase their use to potentially hundreds of thousands of iSeries customers, it would probably have a direct positive impact on the number and type of applications that are developed for the iSeries, which would have a direct positive impact on iSeries sales, which could come across as self-serving for you. Thomas Friedman dedicated a section in his book, "The World Is Flat", to how the "open source" movement has shaped the world. He tells the story of the Apache group developing its renowned HTTP server, which IBM executives eventually acknowledged was better than their own, and IBM capitalizing on an opportunity to not only incorporate the Apache software into its own products, but also to add structure, influence, and control over the Apache group itself. This is an example of how a company with a dominant position in the market is promoting free software, and gaining more from it than the original software developers themselves. This isn't to say that your suggestions to Bob are bad. A free product may in fact be the only way to develop the critical mass necessary to gain a foothold in the market. It used to not be that way in the software business. There's more risk, now. Nathan M. Andelin