Charles Mills wrote:
The MIPS pricing model is terrible - it's just the best model we had. I used to give the example that you buy a couch for $500. Several years later you add a new bedroom onto your house - and the furniture store calls you up and says that now that your house has more square feet, you owe them another $100 for the couch.
Not quite. Mainframes are highly scalable, so the number of footprints doesn't tell the proper story.
Imagine a company with 50 employees that has 50 desktop PCs and a 100 MIPS mainframe. They have 50 copies of Windows and associated software and one copy of z/OS and associated software. Being successful, they increase their business and their IT staff by 50%. They now have 75 desktop PCs and a 150 MIPS mainframe. They now have 75 copies of Windows and associated software and still only one copy of z/OS and associated software. Does anyone reading this actually believe there be no upgrade fee for the mainframe software?
By paying more for z/OS and associated software on the 150 MIPS machine, they keep the mainframe software business as profitable as the PC software business. Without _some_ sort of tiered pricing structure, IBM and everyone else in the software business would have abandoned the mainframe platform long ago...
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