On Mon, Jan 14, 2008 at 10:16:09AM +0200, Matitiahu Allouche wrote: > I am always impressed by people who can draw a wide fresco of general > subjects, like the evolution of the computer industry. I am somewhat less > impressed when I happen to know some of the details, and they are wrongly > pictured. It saps my naive faith in things which are expressed so > authoritatively. What Geoffrey writes about IBM is at best his own > interpretation of the facts.
Could it be anything else but my interpretation of the facts? I should note that you are doing exactly what you are claiming I did and I expect with a far smaller scope of information. Having been there in 1990 working for a customer of IBM who was given a choice of buying an AS400 or nothing by IBM, I can vouch for my facts. In the end they bought a used 3081 which was able to outperform the AS400 by a factor of about 10:1. IBM lost that sale, but it was not the complete loss it could of been, as IBM still had the maintaince contract, and collected monthly payments for software rental and support. So while they did not completely lose on the deal, the loss of a $500,000 sale was significant and repeated hundreds of times. Another customer of IBM we were in contact with did buy an AS400 from a VAR (resller) whose package performed so badly that they reached a settlement where the VAR took back the AS400, refunded their money and gave them a replacement 370 system for free. That loss was on the VAR's books, not IBM's, as IBM did not have to pay for the damage and did not take the AS400 back. So in the end IBM was big enough to weather the storm, but they lost a lot of sales worldwide due to the AS400 which perciptated the world wide "downsizing" of the mid 1990's. It even reached Israel, by 1998 when I went to work for a company renting space in the IBM building in Tel Aviv, it was less than 1/3 occupied by IBM, where in 1990 it was full. I expect that your details are very different, but if you were within IBM at the time you were one of the survivors. I wonder how someone who was "downsized" would describe it. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
