RE: More anti-midrange propaganda

["Joe Pluta" <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> From: Jon Paris
> 
> Just as we are not willing to pay an economic
> price for food (and subsidize our farmers thus 
> depriving 3rd world farmers of a living)

First, you can take THIS particular brand of nonsense and put it in the
political bilge bucket where it belongs - it certainly has NO place here
on the midrange list.  I don't care what your socio-political leanings
are, we have ZERO responsibility for third world farmers, so we're not
"depriving" them of anything.  Please, keep this type of political hokum
off the list.


> so we demand lower hardware costs.  

We demand lower hardware costs because it costs less to make things
every year.  This is the nature of high-tech manufactured goods.  You
either add more features or reduce price.  Computers are just another
facet of electronics.


> Where to make money - services!!

Fine, I'm all for that.  But not by giving them crappy hardware that
REQUIRES $60,000 in services just to be competitive in the marketplace.

Instead, why not come up with (novel idea!) a way to sell services to
iSeries customers!  How about by, say, lowering the price of the box
another $10,000 and offering them a killer legacy application makeover
for $30,000?  Then they can have their great hardware at a cheap price,
they're more competitive than people on other platforms, and IBM still
makes an additional $10,000.

If you spent the same services dollars on an iSeries as you did on a
pSeries, you'd wipe out anything in the marketplace.

See, this concept that IBM has to sell junk in order to get services
revenue is stupid.  What they need is somebody with more than two brain
cells to rub together to design services offerings that work with the
iSeries.  Instead of fobbing off some half-baked utility like WebFacing,
how about offering a real web enablement services offering?  You'd make
money off the hardware, money off the software, you'd position the
platform as competitively superior to everything else (as opposed to the
pSeries or xSeries also ran), and thus you'd increase market share and
revenue.

This isn't rocket science.  It's just that nobody wants to do the work
required to make the company great. 

Joe