On Fri, 2009-10-09 at 02:32 -0400, Bill Klein wrote: > I suspect that many (Possibly even most) existing IBM COBOL customers would > like it if IBM COBOL development had "unlimited" resources for enhancements
Unlimited? No, but if IBM applied a higher percentage of gross it would be nice. Rounding down, on my dinky little 15 MSU box I pay $900 a month for COBOL. There are something like 10,000 mainframe customers, so suppose that they all have dinky little 15 MSU boxes like me and that only 10% of them use COBOL. That's $900,000/month revenue for the COBOL effort at IBM, or a little over $10M per year, and pretty conservative numbers. I'll bet I could rent some nice office space and hire a small team of superprogrammers for that same money, PLUS have enough to pay a modest shareholder dividend. Yeah I know, IBM has other expenses that have to be covered: admin types, testers, support staff. Tom Ross's attention at SHARE isn't free, and he likely has a bigger development crew than my imaginary "small team of superprogrammers". But holy cash cow, ten megabucks! -- David Andrews A. Duda and Sons, Inc. [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
