Posted on 10/10/2009 10:35:49 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Big Blue's best anti-monopoly argument could be comparing its mainframes to Macintoshes.
Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a 50-year-old can of legal worms: the question of whether IBM 's mainframe business, which is estimated to generate as much as a quarter of the company's revenues, represents an anti-competitive monopoly. IBM 's ( IBM - news - people ) critics have been loud enough: The Computer and Communications Industry Association, a consortium of companies that includes Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ), Google ( GOOG - news - people ) and Red Hat ( RHT - news - people ), requested the DOJ's investigation and claims that IBM has locked its mainframe customers into an overpriced IT system where it has complete control of both hardware and software. They say this stifles competitors that offer cheaper, more flexible options.
(Excerpt) Read more at mobile.forbes.com ...
I love my Apple products, but they have a HUGE monopoly of their products, and do everything possible to stifle competition. I have waited a long time for IBM to start flexing muscle. I am amazed IBM has allowed Google/Apple/MSFT to go so long in the Internet world without tossing mega bucks into a viable competition. Big Blue is a great American company, and I can see why the DOJ may want to go after them.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
B.S.
(Ex-IBMer)
Probably stating the obvious here but who wants to bet that Microsoft/Red Hat/Apple/Google donated waaaay more money to Obozo’s campaign than IBM?
(Ex-IBMer)
Years ago they used to have the UN flag in the lobbies.
If M$ and Apple can say this about someone else's products, they are pure sociopaths. M$ and Apple are the quintessential lock-in companies.
[full disclosure - I work for IBM but not mainframer]
No one is locked into IBM. If they wish to use other people’s products they can and may do so. In fact, I cant tell you the number of times have seen HP, SUN, Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Microsoft (almost always), at a customer of IBM.
What people do not understand is that mainframes are different than servers. The OS has to be far more reliable that a simple server as they often process millions of transactions per hour. Even a small glitch in the OS or application code can cost millions of dollars in errors, system downtime, recovery and repair costs.
Further, IBM writes service level agreements to it’s customer that pays penalties if their OS or software fails to perform. Therefor, IBM does not trust nor can they guarantee products from other vendors.
The courts have ruled in the Psystar case (the first one in Federal court in California) that it is impossible for Apple to have an abusive monopoly of their own products. A limited monopoly on thier own Trade marks, inventions, designs, and created products, is what Trade marks, copyright and patents are all about. Part of it is specifically provided for in the Constitution.
Competition is the name of the game and Apple competes against all other makers of desktop and notebook computers as well as MP3 players, networking devices, and application software by other makers.
Re-read the article, it is not Apple that is claiming this.
"The Computer and Communications Industry Association, a consortium of companies that includes Microsoft, Google, and Red Hat, requested the DOJ's investigation..."
A couple of historical points first: IBM's mainframe business is from a bygone era. IBM established mainframes and with OS/360[1] had a remarkable system. The custom was for hardware manufacturers to supply an O/S for their equipment at the same time as the equipment was being released. The last dying gasps of this era were the Data General Eagle[2] and the IBM PC[3].
With the hardware and system software coming from the same vendor, it was an industry standard to lock in customers as much as possible. This wasn't particularly sinister at the time, because competition was wide-open.
Hardware vendor lock in was doomed with the release of Unix Version 7 in 1979. Version 7 was the first portable O/S that didn't have its own "native" hardware. It was also the first Open system in the sense that every system call was fully documented and available for developers.
The original IBM PC attempted to lock in users with PC DOS (the other two promised OSen weren't released until many months after the first PCs were being shipped and so poorly done that they never received any significant market share), but failed when they simultaneously rebranded 3rd party system software (MS DOS) and used what later became commodity hardware because the original IBM PC had completely open hardware specs a la the Apple ][.
AT & T Unix as a proprietary system has been dying a slow death for the last couple decades. It will be dead and buried whenever the current SCO/Caldera lawsuits & bankruptcy is settled. However, it lives on in that interface it used was still completely open and its intellectual offspring include Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Darwin, etc. There is much software from the 1980s that can still run on modern systems, so long as source code is available.
Unix killed off[4] nearly all of the proprietary main frame market for time-sharing. All of IBM's original competition Honeywell, GE, CDC, Burroughs, etc. are dead. This is the rough timeline of mainframe computing.
Moving forward to today, the modern mainframe is a highly parallel system. We have Beowulf Clusters, SGI Altix blades and even (gasp) Microsoft HPC 2008 running on Crays.
That means if IBM can convince the DOJ that the relevant computing market is one where it holds a minority share
I believe that to be exactly the case. I know from following the Linux Kernel Mailing List that IBM certainly contributes to mainframe support on its own machines and big iron support on Linux in general.
They are NOT the bad guys any more.
[1] Frederick Brooks, Mythical Man-Month.
[2] Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine.
[3] The IBM PC was in the unique position of having itself square in the middle of the passing of the era.
[4] With my help, I'm happy to say.
That is an entirely different business model than Apple's outright sales of their hardware -- with optional maintenance agreements-- or, so it seems to me...
Indeed, but that's very old. Once upon a time, only high priests of computing were allowed to even touch machines, the peons had to submit their jobs to lower ranking priests in punch card boxes.
The real bad guy in these particular lock-ins to IBM mainframes is generally the millions of lines of proprietary legacy spaghetti code, some of it in long forgotten computer languages, that would have to be rewritten, and retested, if the user were to migrate to these cheaper options. That is, for many organizations, a daunting task.
If you think MVS , MVS/XA , Jes2 or Jes3 , VTAM , IMS or CICS consists of "spaghetti code" I've got a bridge to sell you ... that they are written in languages that many "programmers" would have difficulty writing in today is true ,, of course there aren't many real programmers left, most "programmers" allow programs written by real programmers to take their rough outline of what their program should do and create their work for them ... that is how you get the spaghetti created by MS and others.
That IBM "spaghetti" code was so tight that ALMOST 30 YEARS AGO I could run 1.4 million non-trivial IMS (V1.1) transactions with an average 0.3 second response time on a 3031-AP with 1 megabyte of real memory servicing 2-5,000 users simultaneously. My CSA was 96.5% after an IPL and rose to about 98.5% after 3 days ,, had to re-IPL mid week. You can't get SOLITAIRE to run on 1mb of memory thanks to MS's "expert" coding.
That is why people pay the money ,, it runs , it's tight and it keeps you in business.
That is an entirely different business model than Apple's outright sales of their hardware -- with optional maintenance agreements-- or, so it seems to me...
The financial model for the last thirty years or more years has been
for a customer to buy the hardware outright from IBM and sell it to
a finance company and lease it back for the most profitable cash flow
and tax benefit.
If you think MVS , MVS/XA , Jes2 or Jes3 , VTAM , IMS or CICS consists of "spaghetti code" I've got a bridge to sell you ... that they are written in languages that many "programmers" would have difficulty writing in today is true ,, of course there aren't many real programmers left, most "programmers" allow programs written by real programmers to take their rough outline of what their program should do and create their work for them ... that is how you get the spaghetti created by MS and others.
Since the days of OS/360 through z/OS of today, system code One would be hard pressed to call it spaghetti. Since Linux and Java run on zSeries Mainframes Amen
has always been "called function" and macros in Assembler.
it is not cost effective to migrate to PC platforms.
Years ago we didn't know the UN was a freak show.
I'm not talking about the code contracted out to and written by IBM... I'm talking about the code written in house by customers who have built in-house of cards applications that currently run on their mainframes that only work today due to being fixed and refixed over many years ... and do mission critical work for the company. I've seen the code and many times untangled it... but there's lots out there.
The problem is re-inventing what already has been done. Some of it very elegantly, as you say, written in tight, concise code... but a lot of it was done very sloppily, sometimes calling programs as sub-routines that was written in other languages. I'm well aware that when memory was tight, you had to write really good code... today, not so much. Lot's of memory and high speed processors lets a lot of sloppy coding be written.
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