We should be able to agree that a license to run the .NET Framework is (currently) available at no additional charge when you purchase a license for a suitable Microsoft Windows product. Not free -- no additional charge.
Is this distinction overly pedantic? I agree with Shmuel Metz and John McKown: it is a very important distinction. Note that the .NET Framework is *both* bundled with Windows products and available for download. (Downloading is for older versions of Windows and/or for version updates.) Also, I was nodding in agreement with John McKown up until he wrote that "most successful migration projects [from mainframes] deliver a positive ROI." (Or is John being ironic in his use of the word "successful"?) Some much smarter people than I who've looked at this question, repeatedly, can't get the numbers to work in most cases. I've looked at their analyses, and they're quite careful in properly allocating costs. A bit more often you can make the ROI weakly positive if you stretch out the analysis period to, say, a century. But it's pretty tough otherwise. And that's typically without incorporating proper risk adjustments. It's quite common for migration projects (of any sort) to have significant cost overruns. It's fair to say that the vast bulk of mainframe shops are running them for very good reasons, including financial reasons. I'm beginning to wonder if good cost accounting and financial analysis are lost arts in many "western" corporations, in the "production" and "production-related" portions of their businesses. For many decades now the best and the brightest financial wizards have been going into banking -- to work on Wall Street and in The City. So they're applying their smarts to very different optimization problems, such as squeezing a few more points out of derivatives trades -- or inventing increasingly more exotic derivatives. That's my hypothesis, although that's after watching an internal (now public) Bain Capital video yesterday. :-) In all seriousness, though, I wonder whether there are too many smart people engaged in unproductive rent seeking. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Consulting Enterprise IT Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
