Re: Re: slanted article "Inside System Storage -- by Tony Pearson"

On Wednesday, September 22, 2010 Paul Raulerson wrote:
> Believe it or not, IBM *does* have a point about protecting IP that
> they spent *billions* of dollars to develop. MVS alone cost about a
> *billion* dollars to develop. I have no idea how much more money has
> been put out iby IBM for development and support of OS390, z/OS, VM,
> z/VM, CICS/Transaction Server, DB2, and all the other products
> around.

More to the point is where did that R&D money come from. IBM didn't
just conjure it up out of thin air. It came from sales of mainframe
systems to banks, airlines, utility companies, and government
departments. And where does their money come from? It comes from you
and me. Over the last 40 years IBM has been paid vast amounts of money
by all of us to help develop an IT infrastructure on which our modern
society now depends.

And let's not forget that the mainframe ecosphere does not consist
solely of IBM hardware and software. As well as an enormous range of
third party products, the viability of the mainframe depends most
importantly on the existence of the 20 trillion dollars worth of
customer-developed applications which IBM is so proud of (see
http://www.ibm.com/software/htp/tpf/tpfug/tgf02/tgf02x.pdf slide 5)
Who paid for those COBOL applications and the IT infrastructure that's
built around them? Not IBM, and yet IBM now seeks to retain a monopoly
on reaping the rewards from this massive customer investment. A
customer investment which dwarfs IBM's claimed R&D expenditure.

The real question is, should the customers, who have invested so much
in legacy applications, be obliged to continue to pay through the nose
to contribute to IBM's profits, or should they have a choice about
where they run their legacy applications? I stress, these are customer
applications we are talking about, they are not IBM's. Many mainframe
customers continue to be happy with IBM quality and are willing to pay
a premium for that. That is fine, and that is free competition. But
the flip side is that many customers are seeking alternative
solutions, not necessary for their core applications but for a variety
of reasons including disaster recovery, testing, training, "sunset
applications" which must be kept running for regulatory reasons, and
which do not need the latest IBM System z to run on. These are the
areas in which IBM is using its monopoly position to exclude customer
choice.

The billions of R&D spent on System z is a red herring. I've no doubt
that System z has some marvellous technology inside it, but that is
not the point. Hercules does not have access to that technology and
does not copy it. What Hercules does provide is an independently
developed alternative platform capable of running customer's legacy
applications. And in a free market the customer should be able to
choose whether he wants to run his applications on System z or a
lower-priced alternative.

--
Regards,
Roger Bowler
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/rbowler
Hercules "I can't believe it's not a mainframe!"