Mac may save IBM's cookies Ping!
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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.
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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?
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.
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...