On 11 June 2010 13:27, john gilmore <john_w_gilm...@msn.com> wrote: > Tony Harminc wrote: > > | And yet again IBM is trying to prescribe in ever more > | detail what kind of computing you can do on your system. > > I do not think that is quite right. I don't think the intrusiveness is > intended. It is a byproduct.
I agree. Nonetheless I find the increased intrusiveness annoying, and fear the inevitable second order effects. > What it seems to me that IBM is trying to do is to provide lower-cost > mechanisms for developing and running notionally new z/Architecture > applications without at the same time compromising its revenue flows from > legacy mainframe cash cows. Certainly. This is the much discussed market segmentation -- seen most famously in airline ticket prices -- on which business school case studies abound. Like most customers/victims of such segmentation, no matter how rational I find it, I am irritated far beyond that rational view. > (Many of these new applications turn out, in my experience anyway, to be the > same old ill-conceived and badly written COBOL applications rewritten in > equally bad Java.) (Many of them use very much more CPU time, as well, which may negate the newly cheaper machines. But I digress...) > None of this is altruistic, but neither is it reprehensible. It is business > as usual. IBM has always repudiated the notion that it is an eleemosynary > organization. IBM, like all large business corporations, is a psychopath. The claim sounds inflamatory, but it is neither new nor unreasonable, and is something all of us who've worked for a large corporation have known in some sense for all our working lives. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/oct/24/politics.money (Which of course says nothing about the many IBMers I have known over the decades who are nice, ordinary, friendly and helpful individuals.) But IBM's "business as usual" inevitably involves unpleasant methods to enforce their business models. Being specific and intrusive about the workloads that may be run on a particular system is perhaps better than failing to specify, relying on inadequate technical measures to enforce the segmentation, and then suing providers of services that allow working around the technology. It is all indeed a byproduct, but one that is unlikely to go away. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
