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Microsoft Access in AS/400 Shops??? Why/why not???
Frank asked: "Just curious, Ralph, given the current state of OfficeVision, what word processing package do you recommend for green screen users or if they need word processing should they have a PC? And for that matter, what spreadsheet package do you recommend? The real questions here are - how far has Microsoft gotten into your shop/shops and how much further do you think Microsoft will get?" I'm under the gun and behind schedule, Frank, and you have to go and ask all these good questions!
This whole area is a fascinating subject. I'll throw some thoughts out here but I'm not going to be able to answer your questions well enough. Maybe we'll get some more ideas thrown in as well. I administered an OfficeVision system when I was QSECOFR of an AS/400 for an insurance company about ten years ago. We used the formatting and data merge of OV/400 to send letters out to customers. It worked well, but I recall some meetings we had to decide on a word processing system prior to developing the bulk of our OV/400 stuff. We used WordPerfect (DOS, 5.1 or so I think) in the office and looked carefully at WordPerfect for the AS/400. It was a hog. I don't recall the other options, but when I brought up OV/400 and prototyped a document with data merge, it was a no brainer. They said why would anybody use anything else? Because IBM is discontinuing it? Well, the days of WordPerfect in the office are over thanks to a great deal of confusion over OS/2 versus Windows that Microsoft had no incentive to dispel. Along with Microsoft's uninnovative competence was extraordinarily incompetent and arrogant competition from the likes of IBM, Lotus, Novell, WordPerfect, then IBM/Lotus and Novell/WordPerfect, then Corel/WordPerfect, and now Microsoft/Corel. Oops, Microsoft is not competing with itself now, or is it? Somehow I doubt it. The short amswer is that Microsoft formats are the universal office solution. However, it is not well understood that powerful alternatives exist to work with those Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats. The feature set and intregration are mature these days, but the M$ cost is now exorbitant. M$ counts on Office to contribute 40% to 50% of profits for Microsoft overall, and if you'ver ever tried to purchase Word or Excel by itself you can see how they meter out this cash cow. For any company that can remember that their employees were smart enough to adapt from DOS WordPerfect to Windows Word, there is Corel WordPerfect Office 2002. I personally have purchased this. At my job, we have Office 97. WordPerfect Office is Word format compatible and has all those WordPerfect touches that made it a standard in offices until the world was assimilated. Quattro Pro has always been a superior spreadsheet, and is now Excel format compatible. There's a presentation package that is Powerpoint compatible. The whole suite now follows Office conventions for getting around, scripting, etc., and is web enabled. The suite is arguably superior and at $150 is 1/3 or 1/4 the cost of Office in the superstores. For even more fun, StarOffice 5.1 can be downloaded for free or obtained on a CD-ROM. This office suite is Word, Excel, and Powerpoint compatible as well and can be freely installed on Windows or Linux. Linux with KDE Konqueror browser and StarOffice is free, open source, and Office format compatible. A new componentized version of StarOffice 6.0 is forthcoming, and this will fit in nicely with peer to peer collaboration. M$ will generate heretofor unseen levels of FUD as they will now be fighting for the very existence of their chokehold around every PC user, all to no avail. Their bluff has been called, their monopolist tactics proved, their evil exposed. Corel, in addition to selling a competing Office suite for Windows, was the main corporate sponsor of an effort to port a Windows infrastructure to Linux in a project called Wine. M$ just invested in Corel, one of their last competitors, one of the few still surviving, and lo and behold, Corel is no longer working to make Windows programs work under Linux. Imagine that. And as a grand finale, M$ seek to steal instant messaging from AOL and media playing from RealPlayer in one fell swoop in XP, coming to a store near you in October. This using the same technique as they used to steal the browser from Netscape, copy the idea and gice it away for free in Windows, make the people fight through M$ deceit to get to their software. And now M$ is attaching an umbilical cord to Windows XP so you have to call home to use it. And call home again if you open up your PC and change a piece of hardware. Any piece. Anything. This makes the old DOS copy protection look benevolent. As for the replacement of OV/400, the one solution that has been mentioned repeatedly as a Word oriented program sounded fine to me. Were there drawbacks to it? I remember a post that listed a couple, but then I've seen other posts since then that seemed to address them. What's the status of this alternative? Also, the posts about reinstalling OV/400 seemed to indicate it still runs, although technically unsupported. Why would anyone need support if it still runs? I wouldn't worry about it until an OS version breaks it, and even then I'd keep a small box at the older release and run it with DDM against your newer production AS/400's. M$ can't get any farther than they have got. They would own our minds outright to get any further, rather than the substantial mindshare they currently have. They have reached their peak, and are now in a downward spiral. Windows 2000 went nowhere, and XP is a desperate grab to nonopolize the Internet as they have the desktop. But the light is shining on this scam, and the US government, 19 states, and the European Union will not let it happen. I personally propose that M$ be required to release Windows 98 SE, including IE 3.0, under the GPL, including all source required to create the programs as shipped by M$. This creates the only competition possible for running Windows programs on newly purchased PC's, a competition that M$ prevents by not allowing former versions of Windows to be sold on new PC's (or makes economically unfeasible with prohibitive pricing). This solution takes discarded technology from M$, much of which was established with illegal business practices, and puts on the market an alternatice to new M$ initiatives that require no further government or industry oversight of conduct remedies, nor a breakup to create multiple monopolies. It creates a free alternative in recognizing that the monopoly is maintained by virtue of being impractical to purchase a new PC without M$'s latest control mechanism. An open source GPL'd Windows 98 SE with Internet Explorer both redeems M$, and is nothing for it to fear if in fact people really do prefer their version of innovation. Ralph
Frank asked: "Just curious, Ralph, given the current state of OfficeVision, what word processing package do you recommend for green screen users or if they need word processing should they have a PC? And for that matter, what spreadsheet package do you recommend? The real questions here are - how far has Microsoft gotten into your shop/shops and how much further do you think Microsoft will get?" I'm under the gun and behind schedule, Frank, and you have to go and ask all these good questions!
This whole area is a fascinating subject. I'll throw some thoughts out here but I'm not going to be able to answer your questions well enough. Maybe we'll get some more ideas thrown in as well. I administered an OfficeVision system when I was QSECOFR of an AS/400 for an insurance company about ten years ago. We used the formatting and data merge of OV/400 to send letters out to customers. It worked well, but I recall some meetings we had to decide on a word processing system prior to developing the bulk of our OV/400 stuff. We used WordPerfect (DOS, 5.1 or so I think) in the office and looked carefully at WordPerfect for the AS/400. It was a hog. I don't recall the other options, but when I brought up OV/400 and prototyped a document with data merge, it was a no brainer. They said why would anybody use anything else? Because IBM is discontinuing it? Well, the days of WordPerfect in the office are over thanks to a great deal of confusion over OS/2 versus Windows that Microsoft had no incentive to dispel. Along with Microsoft's uninnovative competence was extraordinarily incompetent and arrogant competition from the likes of IBM, Lotus, Novell, WordPerfect, then IBM/Lotus and Novell/WordPerfect, then Corel/WordPerfect, and now Microsoft/Corel. Oops, Microsoft is not competing with itself now, or is it? Somehow I doubt it. The short amswer is that Microsoft formats are the universal office solution. However, it is not well understood that powerful alternatives exist to work with those Word, Excel, and Powerpoint formats. The feature set and intregration are mature these days, but the M$ cost is now exorbitant. M$ counts on Office to contribute 40% to 50% of profits for Microsoft overall, and if you'ver ever tried to purchase Word or Excel by itself you can see how they meter out this cash cow. For any company that can remember that their employees were smart enough to adapt from DOS WordPerfect to Windows Word, there is Corel WordPerfect Office 2002. I personally have purchased this. At my job, we have Office 97. WordPerfect Office is Word format compatible and has all those WordPerfect touches that made it a standard in offices until the world was assimilated. Quattro Pro has always been a superior spreadsheet, and is now Excel format compatible. There's a presentation package that is Powerpoint compatible. The whole suite now follows Office conventions for getting around, scripting, etc., and is web enabled. The suite is arguably superior and at $150 is 1/3 or 1/4 the cost of Office in the superstores. For even more fun, StarOffice 5.1 can be downloaded for free or obtained on a CD-ROM. This office suite is Word, Excel, and Powerpoint compatible as well and can be freely installed on Windows or Linux. Linux with KDE Konqueror browser and StarOffice is free, open source, and Office format compatible. A new componentized version of StarOffice 6.0 is forthcoming, and this will fit in nicely with peer to peer collaboration. M$ will generate heretofor unseen levels of FUD as they will now be fighting for the very existence of their chokehold around every PC user, all to no avail. Their bluff has been called, their monopolist tactics proved, their evil exposed. Corel, in addition to selling a competing Office suite for Windows, was the main corporate sponsor of an effort to port a Windows infrastructure to Linux in a project called Wine. M$ just invested in Corel, one of their last competitors, one of the few still surviving, and lo and behold, Corel is no longer working to make Windows programs work under Linux. Imagine that. And as a grand finale, M$ seek to steal instant messaging from AOL and media playing from RealPlayer in one fell swoop in XP, coming to a store near you in October. This using the same technique as they used to steal the browser from Netscape, copy the idea and gice it away for free in Windows, make the people fight through M$ deceit to get to their software. And now M$ is attaching an umbilical cord to Windows XP so you have to call home to use it. And call home again if you open up your PC and change a piece of hardware. Any piece. Anything. This makes the old DOS copy protection look benevolent. As for the replacement of OV/400, the one solution that has been mentioned repeatedly as a Word oriented program sounded fine to me. Were there drawbacks to it? I remember a post that listed a couple, but then I've seen other posts since then that seemed to address them. What's the status of this alternative? Also, the posts about reinstalling OV/400 seemed to indicate it still runs, although technically unsupported. Why would anyone need support if it still runs? I wouldn't worry about it until an OS version breaks it, and even then I'd keep a small box at the older release and run it with DDM against your newer production AS/400's. M$ can't get any farther than they have got. They would own our minds outright to get any further, rather than the substantial mindshare they currently have. They have reached their peak, and are now in a downward spiral. Windows 2000 went nowhere, and XP is a desperate grab to nonopolize the Internet as they have the desktop. But the light is shining on this scam, and the US government, 19 states, and the European Union will not let it happen. I personally propose that M$ be required to release Windows 98 SE, including IE 3.0, under the GPL, including all source required to create the programs as shipped by M$. This creates the only competition possible for running Windows programs on newly purchased PC's, a competition that M$ prevents by not allowing former versions of Windows to be sold on new PC's (or makes economically unfeasible with prohibitive pricing). This solution takes discarded technology from M$, much of which was established with illegal business practices, and puts on the market an alternatice to new M$ initiatives that require no further government or industry oversight of conduct remedies, nor a breakup to create multiple monopolies. It creates a free alternative in recognizing that the monopoly is maintained by virtue of being impractical to purchase a new PC without M$'s latest control mechanism. An open source GPL'd Windows 98 SE with Internet Explorer both redeems M$, and is nothing for it to fear if in fact people really do prefer their version of innovation. Ralph
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