Re: **SPAM** Re: AIX - i5/OS feature comparison was the notorious Steve's soapbox

[Larry Bolhuis <lbolhuis@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Tommy,

 You are right on with most of this but in one way I think you are 
wrong. If IBM truly set to marketing the System i family and got the 
ISVs to join them then they might hurt their x business, even hurt it 
bad, but overall the market share they made up from Compaq, Dell, et al. 
would make up for the loss to x.  Customers would then have more money 
to spend on doing things for their business rather than on technicians 
to reboot their Windoze servers every night.

 And the IBM consulting arm might take a hit. I once heard that THE 
reason that SAP isn't big on i is because you can't sell enough 
consulting hours to make real money for implementations on i.

   - Larry

Holden Tommy wrote:
> Ok hopefully this will be my last chime in on this subject.  The reason
> I see that IBM can't sell services to offset the profit margin for
> iSeries is simply that it DOESN'T need tons of peripheral applications
> to make it work...it runs out of the box.  Why do they NOT market the
> system better??  Simple, they can make more money selling peripheral
> garbage on the other platforms.  Selling the cheaper hardware, etc isn't
> the issue, it's how much can they make off the ancillary packages they
> are sure to sell with other platforms??  With iSeries, I can get the
> machine up & running & it can pretty much do anything & everything
> necessary to keep the shop running.  I KNOW this just isn't the case
> with other platforms, PC, AIX, *NIX. The iSeries IS legendary, but from
> a corporate standpoint IBM's profits would plummet if the iSeries became
> the primary platform on Earth...why?? Because they are just frigging
> tanks!  I have never seen an iSeries totally broken down to the point
> that it's just not viable anymore.  As with any hardware yes there will
> be parts that need replaced occasionally but never have I seen the need
> to fully replace an iSeries due to failure (only for upgrades to
> performance, etc.)  Heck I still have customers running on old CISC
> boxes..(not by my choice but it just simply works...)  As far as the CPU
> intensive arguments I've seen all I can say is that it's mostly
> garbage...no offense to anyone on the list but I just don't see where a
> couple of milliseconds is that detremental...(plus since I don't have
> them..perhaps some one can actually post some real world examples & the
> total time to run these applications on iSeries vs. other platforms...)
> Just maybe you'll convince me...IBM does still believe in the iSeries,
> but as I stated...from a business standpoint they could literally kill
> their own business & profits by saturating the market with iSeries.
> Just my 2 coppers.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Tommy Holden  
>
>