Peter Farley writes: >AFAIK, that is a (relatively) recent *new* initiative.
About 10 years and counting, if my recollection is correct. We cannot change the past, and the original assertion was not in the past tense. Here's a bit more history for perspective. DEC was particularly aggressive in courting universities in the 1970s and 1980s, providing them with lots of low priced and/or "free" stuff. DEC's technologies are now a very minor and shrinking part of HP, which in turn is struggling. As another example, Apple has been powerful in education for many years, but then graduates mostly bought PCs for a couple decades as Apple's marketshare mostly dropped. It was only recently that Apple moved into an industry leadership position (though not necessarily in marketshare), and it's hard to make an argument that Apple's strength in education had much to do with its recent successes. I'm a huge proponent of assisting universities and other educational institutions -- don't get me wrong. But we should be both enthusiastic and realistic about the impact of that support. There are many, many popular products and services that are mostly or completely absent from university campuses. The technologies I learned and used on campus I mostly never used again after I graduated. John Gilmore opines: >We are in a situation much like that of the atomic-energy industry >some years ago. I think that analogy breaks down pretty quickly -- my view. Eric Bielefeld observes: >This isn't really about IBM & academia, but I think it may speak to IBM's >commitment to the mainframe. As many of you know, I worked for a little >over 3 years for IBM in Dubuque Iowa. The Dubuque facility is primarily for >outsourcing. They have some Mainframe clients, but many many more clients >that they outsource for doing Windows, Unix, Linux, and just about anything >companies want. I believe there are at least 2 or 3 other places in the US >that provide the same services. I think the biggest problem IBM has, at >least in Dubuque, is low pay. If the pay is too low, the market will correct that. Any employer that fails to offer adequate compensation won't be able to attract and to retain an appropriate workforce. However, compensation is now globally sensitive in many more professions. Yes, even (increasingly) for top managers. Still, I'm quite sure IBM's pay in Dubuque is not even close to the lowest in the world. Also, I'm quite sure there's nothing platform-specific about these compensation trends (as you allude to). If anything, mainframe-related skills should be less sensitive to cross-border compensation pressures, other things being equal. IBM has hired and presumably will continue to hire from the groups of students studying in mainframe-related areas, in Iowa and elsewhere. As another personal editorial comment, I think there's a strong role for government in setting tax and spending policies that promote "the general welfare." As one example among many, U.S. corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP used to be over 6% in the early 1950s. Last year they were about 1.2% of GDP, and corporate profits are particularly strong. That's a big policy change, and I don't think it's the right one. (I'm pretty much a Rawlsian.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples GMU VCT Architect Executive (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
