On Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:02:47 -0400, Bob Shannon wrote: >... It's hard to fault IBM for listening to the customers who >spend the most money.
Hard, maybe, but certainly not impossible. Big companies spend the money, but big companies "go under" (fail) -- and where is their replacement (to IBM's revenue stream) going to come from? Small companies. There are SMALL COMPANIES and then there are small companies. Certainly some grow faster than others, and just as certainly they grow if they are at the right place at the right time. Some -- definitely not all -- of that 'luck' (which is a product of skill, timing and luck) needs the capabilities of a nimble IS unit. But lets (please!) not kid ourselves, big companies existed prior to digital computing -- we don't deserve all of the credit. Nor does IBM. IBM is following the thought that 90% of the revenue might be coming from 10% of the customers, leaving the remaining 90% of the customer base to fend for themselves. The IBM business partners get to pick & choose from those 'fenders' but there are a dwindling number of business partners (as they consolidate) which leaves more customers wandering around, muttering to themselves, "What happened to the old IBM?" In the old days, Amdahl or HDS/Itel would pickup some of those customers -- less hardware revenue for IBM but at least the customer would stay on the platform. IBM eventually grabbed a lot of those customers back when the ECL to CMOS (and more importantly 31-bit to 64-bit) migrations happened. But IBM was already dropping the ball with the small customers by that time. At some point a competing vendor - on a different platform - will be able to sell the account on the idea of attempting a 'mainframe migration'. After all, you don't hear about any mainframe migration failures in the press, right? (If only it were true that migrations don't fail.) -- Tom Schmidt Madison, WI ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
