RE: Changed to: Interactive Tax -- MIDRANGE-L

Tom,

Once again, you've gotten it "extremely right"...:-D

But I not only DON'T take these things for granted, I get steamed that they
haven't improved on these fundamental strengths (and some haven't been
enhanced for decades).

If I've come across as disrespectful to the current OS developers, it's only
because it seems they are disrespectful to the original designers of the
architecture.  I'm sure they don't intend to be, but since I don't see any
of them on this list, I forget...


CL and DDS, in general, and subfiles, in particular, could be VASTLY
improved on, not abandoned...  That's all I'm saying.  I see some signs that
this is happening, but other signs that it's going to be whirly-gigs that
get most of the development dollars.

I s'pose I get a little bit of an attitude, because I've heard the argument:
you business programmers don't understand the complexities of putting an OS
together...  This list shows that to be absurd, but I find the converse to
be very true:  the OS developers have no idea what it takes to use the 400
to run a business.  That includes businesses from one-man shops to Fortune
50 customers, so I don't expect them to understand how it is...


Is it too much to expect them to listen to their customers?  Not that they
don't...  But could they listen to their customer's more, and rely on focus
groups less...?  This is about the ONLY advantage I see that OSS developers
have over the iSeries developers...  The OSS community doesn't rely on focus
groups.


jt

| -----Original Message-----
| [mailto:midrange-l-admin@midrange.com]On Behalf Of thomas@inorbit.com
| Sent: Friday, December 28, 2001 11:13 PM
|
| On Fri, 28 December 2001, Chuck Lewis wrote:
|
| > jt wrote:
| >
| > <There are plenty of tools that allow you to re-engineer your
| applications, to a
| > client/server mode that bypasses the interactive "tax".  Few,
| however, can
| > afford the massive expense of re-engineering their apps.
| That's why many refer
| > to iSeries customers as "captive".>
| >
| > jt, no offense but my understanding of the term "captive" in
| regards to the
| > AS/400 has always been that it would be so hard to move off of
| the AS/400 to
| > something else because of the integrated data base, etc. In the
| Unix world it is
| > pretty easy to hop from Sun to HP...
|
| I did a two-week "facilities management" stint for a site a few
| years back. The company had been purchased a couple years earlier
| by a larger company and their S/38 installation was being
| converted to run on the parent company's system. Original
| estimate for conversion was approx 6 months. When I was there,
| the project had been going for 18 months and the latest estimate
| to completion was "6 months". (I know projects often go that way,
| but it wasn't like requirements kept changing or any normal
| scope-creep was happening.)
|
| Seems they were having trouble giving similar functionality what
| with those pesky subfiles, external descriptions, etc. No one in
| the parent organization had any idea in the beginning of how much
| functionality was integrated in the S/38 and has been simply
| taken for granted by us.