7 Apr
2013
7 Apr
'13
5:58 p.m.
> There is further irony [...] because everyone in
IT is talking about
> virtualisation and [...]. But both concepts have been around in the
> mainframe world for 30 years or more. [...]
Indeed.
> By providing virtualisation, VMware is doing for
Intel platforms
> what VM/370 did onmainframes in the 1970?s.
Is it? How easy is it to run VM-in-VM with VMware? (That's a serious
question; I have never even looked at it myself. Work has never
required it, and, like all closed-source software, it's simply not
under consideration for my home use. Someday I want to learn enough of
the x86 hypervisor hardware facilities to build a hypervisor of my own,
but so far opportunity and inclination have not coincided for that.)
Mainframe is a
utility service, and has almostalways been so. Many
advocates of utility services are actually ?reinventingthe
mainframe? in many aspects of what they seek to achieve.
So, why is IBM allowing
this to happen? Why aren't they there to give VMware and others
hell, perhaps even
supply a bit more economical solution for the /little people/?
Why should they? Not everyone is interested in going after every
possible market. IBM has, apparently, decided that their shareholders
are best served by ignoring tiny-to-small sites, instead going after
larger sites more or less excusively. And, for suitable values of
"best served", I'm not sure they're wrong.
Why does IBM assume that people will have the
telepathic ability to
learn about IBM and its products?
What "people"? Buyers for large corporations (and other entities of
similar size, such as governments) _do_ know about IBM; most of them
have, and the rest can get hold of, a sales rep with little-to-no
trouble. Said sales rep isn't going to be talking to individuals or
small businesses, no, but then we're back to IBM having no interest in
selling to them. Given the degree of technical cluelessness I've
heard of (and occasionally observed) in the individual and
small-to-medium business markets, I'm not at all sure they're wrong to
do so; the handholding necessary to support such customers may very
well leech away too much of their value to the company to be worth
bothering with. (Not all such customers ar elike that, but it's hard
to tell in advance which ones are clued.)
For a supposedly successful platform, why isn't
IBM interested in
making it even more successful and getting more people to use and
perhaps switch to it?
I don't know. See above for some (only partially founded) speculation
on the question.
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