You know, I'm as big a fan of the mainframe as anyone. I've used mainframes for at least 45 of my 58 years on this planet, have made my living off them for almost 40 of those, and continue to do so.
But the articles Bill Johnson is citing as proof that the mainframe is so superior to other platforms are seriously weak, if read with a critical eye. For those of us in the mainframe part of the industry, failing to recognize that the mainframe is in trouble is beyond folly-it's hastening its demise. Every year, more customers migrate away because they can, or at least think they can. The real value of the mainframe today is in the business logic implemented in billions of lines of COBOL and assembler and PL/I and the rest. Reimplementing that from the ground up is what fails every time, whether spectacularly (as in, it flat-out doesn't work and has to be scrapped) or not (with "only" significant loss of function and/or bugs that the folks on the ground must work through with great cost and pain). We as mainframe fans need to keep our eyes on that ball, and use that extremely compelling argument against migration, not wave our hands and say "It's gooderT!" and expect that to somehow prevail against the evidence. .phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
