its hard to tell what was hacked. Most of the world's credit card data lives on mainframes and there's almost no chance of a hack there. But lots of data has to move around at the margins and that's where the exposures usually are.
Steve Comstock wrote; > > Right. And IBM has done the worst job of speaking up. True enough, but they have been trying to do a better job of that lately. Probably still a fairly comical effort, but I give them points for entertainment value as well as effort. > I sometimes think the folks in Armonk sit around and > chuckle, "Yes, yes, it's going just like we planned!" They have been successful at getting the server platforms into the #1 or #2 slot in each competitive sector. So maybe its going the way they planned... I suppose they might grin about that. I am not sure I would go so far as to believe there is some master plan that's just playing out like a movie script. They are doing a lot of things in a lot of areas at the same time and some are working well. Others are less so... like, oh, PCs. > After all, if they can get everyone to move off z/OS > but still use mainframes to run Linux, they can get > rid of those expensive software development and > support costs. I doubt that. There are big dollar projects (Can you say "enduring value" boys and girls?) going on inside the IBM behemoth TODAY that are (in theory) trying to bring the z business back into a more competitive position. Those are largely in response to demands from top tier customers who understand how much of their own business depends on the ongoing viability of the z business. In a place as big as IBM there will be a lot of people with different agendas, including some who would like to see Linux uber alles. Doesn't mean they call the shots or that the corporation has some sinister plan to move the world to Linux. Linux gets mindshare inside IBM because it has huge mindshare outside and IBM is first last and always a for-profit business. > And, of course, services are where > the biggest profit margins are. "It's nothing personal, > guys, it's just business." They might be the biggest profits in terms of the gross numbers, but not in terms of margins. Services is a people intensive business. You make money by charging enough to make a profit, but not so much that your customer wants to bear the direct cost of doing it themselves. How often today do you hear how expensive people are? It makes for relatively low margins, but you can still make big profits on low margins if you sell enough of it, as shown by Dell, McDonalds etc. Hardware on the other hand is massively profitable, even with the maniacal degree of engineering IBM puts into the z and p series platforms. Shared design and tooling has really pushed the costs down for both platforms. Software is somewhere in between and a lot closer to hardware than to services. Good margins in those business areas are the engine that funds all of the other stuff. Linux currently drives some hardware revenues (highly profitable) and some services revenues (profitable but less so) and I would guess that the (Linux) software is about a wash. It would be a dumb businessman that would trade the current mix for an all-Linux mix. CC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
