Tim, let me give this a shot. 1. 1. Explain why smaller z/OS developers are important. That ought to be fairly easy.
Fairly easy for me to explain to a friendly audience. Very difficult to explain to an endless chain of executives who don't see how small software developers affect their bonus and or objectives. 2. Explain what changed for the worse and how much worse (or what didn't change but needs to change, and how). I'm a little puzzled because, over a decent time span anyway, I don't recall z/OS development resources ever being "cheap." (When was this mythical "those were the days!" everyone is talking about? Wasn't it a lot more expensive to write and support code for MVS in, say, 1986?) Is today's price a record low, or is it getting worse? That's an important question, and I honestly don't know the answer. No longer really being on the business side of MVS software development, I'm not sure -- but yes, the P/390 announcement was the golden day of small-company MVS development. Where this thread started is that it looks like its more complex, more expensive successor is going away. That is a turn for the worse, for the way worse. 3. Explain the business impact. A $1,000/month expense for a software company making $1,000,000 per year in profit isn't a bad situation, for ... Woo-hoo! It must be nice having that perspective on what a small software company is! My company had the #3 product in its mainframe category and the most profit we EVER made in a year was about $250K. Not real useful to talk about company size in terms of profit because profit is affected by so many factors. Better to talk about company size in terms of revenue. A $1MM profit would probably be a company with around $10MM in sales. $10MM in revenue would make you about the 400th largest SW company in the world. (Source: Software Magazine 2005 "The Software 500") I'll bet the Dave Salt's of mainframe development would kill for that kind of revenue. No, we're talking about the one-to-three man shops, where the real creative stuff comes from. A prosperous three-man shop might have revenues of $400K-600K; a struggling startup might have revenues that were much, much less, and so yes, $1000/month is a BIG deal. And the point of the thread is, I believe, that if FLEX goes away, the cost will be much, much more than $1000/month. Does this help? Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Timothy Sipples Sent: Monday, October 09, 2006 1:40 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Software Pricing (Was: A Letter To The FLEX-ES Community) Sorry, I disagree. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
