Farley, Peter wrote: >This is a question that has been on my mind for some time now while perusing responses like yours and others from the IBMer's who monitor this list. The consistent message seems to be that mainframe development resources are very constrained, so only the most important/most useful/most justified projects (FSVO most) can be undertaken. (E.G., "functional stability" for the TSO and ISPF and Rexx components, among many others.)
>If IBM will only stay in high-margin businesses (repeated many times by company leaders over the decades), and the mainframe software/hardware market is in fact such a business for IBM, then why are IBM's mainframe development resources so terribly constrained that only "this must be done" projects can be developed, but not "it would be really nice if ..." projects? Why are all possible/desired/required projects not staffed properly to develop, test and support all of them (or at least most of them, again FSVO "most")? >It seems to me that IBM is cutting off its nose to spite its face by not having a much larger complement of development resources to handle far more of the mainframe customer's needs and wants. If the mainframe margin is high, it should be supportable to significantly increase development resources from the shareholder point of view in order to increase the volume and thus (in the long term) the profit. It would appear that short-term financial gain is still being used to restrict "expenses" like staff in order to maintain/increase short-term profitability at the expense of long-term market growth. >Just a question. I don't really expect an answer, since we'd have to engage in an NDA-protected dialog with top management and the company board to get anything approaching a real answer. >My real fear is that the mainframe software/hardware market is not one that IBM's management and board sees in its long-term future (FSVO "long"), and that the short-staffing of development resources is a symptom of that failure to see. Obviously I have no crystal ball, nor connection to the IBM PTB, but I think the answer here is pretty simple: those areas are considered "mature" and with little specific growth potential (revenue or platform), so IBM sees no reason to invest in them. You and I can argue about the accuracy of the latter half of this assertion, suggesting drag-along value and so forth, but the first part is certainly correct. And this is one of the problems with commercial software (or at least differences between it and open source): it's not a labor of love, so it's almost always 75% "done" at best, because "good enough is good enough" and it's time to move on to the next pasture where the grass is easier to mine (how's that for mixing metaphors?). It can also be the problem with traditional metrics of "quality": Rexx has relatively few APARs against it because it's very solid. Some other products have relatively few APARs against them because they're so horrible that people can't be bothered. Other products are great and loved and widely used - and have many, many APARs because folks use them in widely varied ways, well beyond what their designers anticipated. The PC software model has always struck me as (mostly) more broken than the mainframe model, because you're driven to add features so you can justify a new version and thus new revenue, rather than just keeping your customers happy. Adobe is a perfect example: FrameMaker is at V12, and is full of ways to crash it by doing tricky things like clicking on the wrong part of the screen. By Version 12, one would hope that stability was baked in, but no. And this has been true with every version I've used, from 6 or 7 on up (so it isn't just one buggy version). Since Adobe is managing to keep selling upgrades, why fix the bugs? (I do have to wonder how many of those upgrades are from folks who are stuck with Frame and are hoping for better stability-but we still buy it!) So as an upper-level manager, how do you decide which products to invest in? Many APARs or few? Popular or no? Last year you sold $xM of product Y. This year your Board would like you to sell more. Are you going to do that fixing bugs and adding incremental features to a product that's mature, or by putting those same resources on new&shiny? Not even worth asking the question, really. .phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
