Wrong equations :-) What is the *business case* for adding better optimizations to the COBOL compiler?
Back in the day when there was fierce PCM competition, you could add new instructions and then spend money in compiler exploitation as a competitive advantage. Now the business case is a little fuzzier, I would guess. On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 8:20 AM, David Andrews <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
