Re: IBM's Watson computer is for a niche market also

On 5/15/2013 10:02 AM, Eric Lehti wrote:

Evan Harris,
I disagree with you regarding:

IBM i is a niche platform
RPG is a language on a niche platform
IBM i (and therefore RPG) are not mainstream systems and therefore

most development does not take place using RPG.

My comments are:
- IBM's Watson computer is for a niche market also, right?

Yes, it is. How many programming jobs are available for Watson? A
handful. This defines a niche.

- The international space station in low earth orbit is a niche market
for computers and languages, right? Yet someone has to program its
computers, right? Is the international space station a dead-end career
path for a computer programmer?

How many programming jobs are available for Space Station? A handful.
This defines a niche.

Niche does not mean the same thing as dead end job. It means that you
will need very special and distinct skills to get one of those few jobs.

- The Fortune 500 companies are a niche market also, right? Yet a VERY
high percentage of these large companies run their businesses on IBM
hardware, including IBM i on Power. The largest organizations are a
niche market that need the computer systems that IBM offers.

No, Fortune 500 is not a niche. There are hundreds of thousands of
programming jobs available in the Fortune 500 space. Somewhere between
'hundreds of thousands' and 'handful' lies an ephemeral boundary - the
niche market. Niche doesn't mean bad or dead end or archaic. It means
there are not a lot of jobs, and the jobs you can get have special
requirements.

We know, of course, that most people work in sole proprietorships and
small businesses employing ten or fewer people. These very small
businesses do not need the IBM I, but rather, Intuit's QuickBooks.

I embrace your logic and declare that "mainstream systems" are those
that sole proprietorship businesses use. Therefore, Intuit's QuickBooks
is the predominant accounting system in America.

I appreciate the sarcasm as much as anyone; alas I think the analogy
isn't really on point. We were talking about programming jobs. How
many programmers does Intuit employ? I had a look at their web site
http://careers.intuit.com/ and enjoyed the irony of the text in their
'Professional' column. It reads 'find your niche'. Off to the right, I
see they're hiring manager types in Mountain View, CA and software types
in Bangalore, India.

If you want to be a programmer today, a niche market is THE place to be.
There are millions of programmers using Java, and with the state of the
world's telecom system, Java programmers in India, Nigeria and Mongolia
are competing one-on-one against programmers in California, New South
Wales and Ireland. I can bet that of the millions of Java programmers
in India there are hundreds of thousands who do it better than I do.
For much less money than I need. When push comes to shove, they're
going to get that Java job and I'm not. Flip that around. How many
programmers in all the world can slip into a chair at 9 AM, understand
and modify a matching record RPG program written in the 1970s and at
9:30 use RPGUnit to guarantee the quality of a subprocedure written in
/free ILE RPG at 9:15? And then add a few columns to a result set in an
SQL stored procedure at 10 so the web guys can test out a 'what if'
scenario?

Niche can be good if you prepare for it.
--buck