On Tue, 9 Jun 2020 17:23:48 +0000, Doug wrote:

>And maybe the third dumb thing they did was give DOS to Gates and trash 
>OS/2
>
And way before that, not making PL/S a product.  It left a void that's
belatedly being filled by Metal C.

>------ Original Message ------
>From: "Farley, Peter x23353"
>Sent: 09-Jun-20 12:25:16
>
>>The first really dumb thing that IBM did was to STOP providing heavily 
>>discounted mainframe hardware and software to universities and colleges.  The 
>>NYC public colleges (CUNY, City University of New York) used to offer courses 
>>in COBOL and VSAM and many other mainframe technologies in the 1970's and 
>>into the 1980's, as did prestigious universities like NYU, but by the time my 
>>son attended CUNY post-2000 there were none of these courses available any 
>>more.  Everything in the CS area was x86 hardware and Linux OS based.
>>
>>The second really dumb thing that IBM did was to stop caring and feeding 
>>smaller commercial businesses running various combinations of DOS / VSE / VM 
>>software on (then) less-expensive hardware, at least in the US.  I think 
>>Europe still has a thriving or at least surviving VM/VSE community.  
>>Successful small businesses, while less profitable in the present can easily 
>>over time become larger businesses needing the IBM flagship OS and 
>>corresponding hardware.  No small ecosystem growing into a larger ecosystem 
>>means the potentially profitable pipeline dries up.
>>
>>Just my personal opinions of course.
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Tom Brennan
>>Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2020 11:54 AM
>>
>>When I bought my Yamaha piano in 1989, I heard a story that Yamaha had been 
>>supplying free pianos to universities for years.  It was more than them just 
>>being nice, they knew that someone practicing every day on the school grand 
>>piano would likely go on to buy one, or be the decision maker for an 
>>orchestra, night club, or whatever.  I always thought that was super smart of 
>>them.  What I always thought was rather dumb, is that IBM doesn't do similar 
>>with educational use of all their software.  And that's just copied bits ... 
>>no wood, metal, delivery, tuning, etc.
>>
Was the (1959?) Consent Decree an obstacle to that?  Did IBM partly
persist under the umbrella of R&D partnerships?

>>On 6/9/2020 5:02 AM, Bob Bridges wrote:
>>>  A coworker just sent me this brief article.
>>>
>>>  
>>> https://www.techrepublic.com/article/everyone-wants-to-retire-mainframes-but-74-of-modernization-efforts-fail/

-- gil

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