Peter Farley opines: >They [IBM] have, time and again, shown themselves quite capable of >deliberately reducing the effectiveness of new technology to preserve >their revenue stream for a few more quarters.
Examples? I'll offer a counterexample: the System/360. IBM led the electromechanical tabulating and accounting equipment market, and the System/360 utterly destroyed the very market IBM dominated. The System/360 was either going to be history's stupidest act of corporate suicide or one of history's most brilliant business successes, depending on how it turned out. More recent examples are obviously more relevant than older ones. No points awarded if the examples have other plausible motives available. By the way, this question has just been answered for COBOL. Enterprise COBOL Version 5.1 is available, now. Turn on the new compiler optimizations and measure the results. They be good. In my opinion it's delusional to think IBM would invest huge sums and many years developing (and shipping!) an entirely new backend for a product it didn't believe in and that it didn't expect to sell. Utterly, completely delusional, with absolutely no sense of reality -- business or technical. In my personal view. Sometimes people post conspiratorial stuff here and then I think, "That individual is not rational in thought." Maybe others' experiences are different, but I haven't persuaded many people to act when I present an irrational argument. They just look at me funny and say something like, "OK, that's very interesting. Thank you for sharing." I've learned to be a little more thoughtful in trying to understand the world, rationally. I applaud IBM for Enterprise COBOL V5 and recommend others do the same. Well done, and more, please. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
