I would like to add some thoughts, or experiences.
First, I, too, am old enough to remember very well the time when
relational database technology was not "common sense", as is is today.
I was told in 1985 ca., when I was doing DB2 and SQL classes at a
big car manufacturerer's site in Germany (well-known), that DB2 will
never be used there to drive their business. I ignored that and continued
to concentrate on relational DB systems. Some years later, all applications
there were converted to DB2, step by step (I was once again there, later,
doing another class). I'm not working there, any more, but I have been
doing the whole DB2 education for another big customer since 1992,
until today.
Then: I am working as a consultant in some system programming related
areas where IBM tools and software are lacking the needed function
from the application programmers' viewpoint. I am providing the needed
function. But it is always a sort of problem, because the customers can not
imagine that I am able to provide better support in certain areas than IBM,
so I have some problems regarding customers' confidence (and price).
I am normally successful, in the end, but the negociations are not easy
sometimes.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 04.07.2014 21:53, schrieb John Gilmore:
I think that IBM long ago concluded that it could not do everything,
and thus that the existence of other centers of development, the ISVs,
was and is in its best interests.
The problem with the separate, individual consideration of the
business cases for extension A, extension B, extension C, . . . is
that there may be, often are important synergies among them. Their
one-at-a-time evaluation is simplistic. De minimis is doubtless a
good doctrine for appelate courts; in the IT industry it is a recipe
for obsolescence and with it progressive irrelevance.
Worse, economic significance is only easy to evaluate in retrospect.
(I am old enough to remember when there was vigorous argument within
IBM about the merits, if any, of relational data base managers like
DB2.)
Quotations are apparently expected from me, and I will provide one.
No man can have in his mind a conception of the future, for the future
is not yet. But of our conceptions of the past, we make a future.
--Thomas Hobbes
John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA
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