My wild guess would be something along the lines of 2 (although I would not be privy to the information if 1 or 3 were the root cause).
The costs of the FLEX program are obvious: the time of all of the people involved, and the (theoretical, but very measurable) loss of revenue on VERY deeply discounted hardware and software. The benefits are harder to measure: the benefit of having a bunch of small vendors. Perhaps the small vendors are just not strategic to IBM. It's easier to deal with a modest handful of large players than a passel of large, medium, small, and tiny players. Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Warner Mach Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 6:09 AM To: [email protected] Subject: IBM vs Flex-Es - Why? I do not have any direct stake in the FLEX-ES vs IBM issue, but I have been surprised that there does not seem to be much speculation on why IBM is dropping the FLEX-ES connection; just complaints that they are doing so ... Is the reason only known to a few IBM executives? . To fill the void, I offer the following speculative reasons: . 1. Complaint: Fundamental Software is doing something that IBM does not like ... This is probably not the reason, because if it was IBM would state it. . 2. Economic: The IBM bean-counters have made a cold calculation that they would make more money if Flex-Es was gone. Maybe having a lot of developers out there causes competition for IBM tools software(?). Maybe IBM would make more revenue by forcing at least some of the folks who now use Flex-Es to buy 'real' hardware(?). . 3. Legal: The IBM lawyers have decided that the company would do better in court if they adopt a simple 'no emulation' stance. In that way they can better confront any attempts by competitors to sell emulated mainframes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
