The Justice Department has started an investigation into whether IBM abused its monopoly position in the mainframe computers market.
(From The New York Times)
The story "U.S. begins inquiry of IBM in mainframe market" published October 7, 2009 at 4:15 PM is no longer available on CNET News.
Certainly "Vegaman_Dan"; and, notice what was stated in this article: Re: "The organization, which is backed by IBM competitors like Microsoft and Oracle, claims that IBM stymied competition in the mainframe market and blocked attempts by competitors and potential partners to license IBM's software.
The complaint follows similar legal action taken by T3 Technologies against IBM.
T3, a small company that resold mainframe-like computers, filed an antitrust complaint against IBM earlier this year in Europe. T3 has also filed a civil suit against IBM in the United States, but last week a federal district judge in New York dismissed that case. T3 said it planned to appeal..."
Will it appear that since the company (IBM) will not be "shrinking" anytime soon as you mentioned the other day; then, it should be taken down instead by these companies. It was "thirteen years" then (the U. S. Justice Department against IBM); and, with OS/2 still making money to afford IBM to pay legal fees.... what if it takes twenty-six years this time around?
So the core argument here is that T3 wants to be able to resell products that IBM makes and IBM doesn't want to sell to them. Unless it is based around the "right of first sale" it seems bogus to me.
Mainframes... haha... I get a kick out of every customer who shows me their Iron. I laugh as the consultants walk in looking at the mainframe like it's the Whopper computer from War Games. $300/hr consultants who know your business and just how to take your money...
Big blue's Iron days have been coming to an end... funny the DOJ is looking at this just now... I smell $$$ settlement / fees coming!! Gotta pay back the loans some how!
Withi multi core processors, cheap RAM and storage, and using DB like Oracle, Client Server system can easily replace mainframe apps. I see lot of m/f to client server migration projects going on now.
Mainframe will likely see the dead end in the future.
PC servers, while great that they are cheap and abundant and you can get any bum off the street with a MS certification to administer them are not the end all be all of corporate computing. There are a ton of applications where they simply can't replicate or substitute the features of some of the big iron systems in a real or meaningful way. Features that companies like banks, where uptime is a priority.
These systems are built with a completely different mindset. Fault tolerance and redundancy is designed down to the microcontroller level on most of them. On the software side you will not see anything like the level of sophistication in Linux or Windows operating systems. In fact, IBM has been a big contributor of Linux to add many of these features to it for their own needs so customers have options. In the last 10 years PC operating systems have slowly been replicating some of the features in the big iron but they are still lacking many fundamentals.
Yes you can replace many systems with PC servers but to say you can "easily replace mainframe apps" just doesn't understand the marketplace for these systems. PC based servers are evolving and will eventually have most of those features but as it is right now your comment just doesn't ring true.
Unlike several other large computer technology companies I could name, IBM has always taken product liability seriously. They themselves are also people whose lives can be negatively impacted by machinery and other infrastructure designed and managed by their products. This is especially so when you manufacture both the hardware and the software of the platform. Mainframe operating systems employ hardware error detection and correction routines for hardware manufactured by IBM, not for hardware manufactured by someone else. How are they to be deemed obligated to license those operating systems to run on unsupported platforms? Can they be legally forced to assume that liability? If so, who is going to pay for the product development and testing needed to support that currently unsupported hardware, users who run on IBM hardware?
Our company did the analysis on switching from our mainframes to Open Systems. At a minimum we had concluded it would have costed us at least $1.2 Million dollars to get a bare server cluster that could handle the same amount of processing that we do on the mainframe. The biggest killer is also finding comparable applications that run on Open Systems. We have alot of in house written apps that run on the mainframe and having to re-write those apps would take a couple of years.
I think many of you under estimate the tangible and non-tangible costs of migrating away from a mainframe.
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The complaint follows similar legal action taken by T3 Technologies against IBM.
T3, a small company that resold mainframe-like computers, filed an antitrust complaint against IBM earlier this year in Europe. T3 has also filed a civil suit against IBM in the United States, but last week a federal district judge in New York dismissed that case. T3 said it planned to appeal..."
Will it appear that since the company (IBM) will not be "shrinking" anytime soon as you mentioned the other day; then, it should be taken down instead by these companies. It was "thirteen years" then (the U. S. Justice Department against IBM); and, with OS/2 still making money to afford IBM to pay legal fees.... what if it takes twenty-six years this time around?
"Long Lives OS/2 Warp"!
Big blue's Iron days have been coming to an end... funny the DOJ is looking at this just now... I smell $$$ settlement / fees coming!! Gotta pay back the loans some how!
Mainframe will likely see the dead end in the future.
These systems are built with a completely different mindset. Fault tolerance and redundancy is designed down to the microcontroller level on most of them. On the software side you will not see anything like the level of sophistication in Linux or Windows operating systems. In fact, IBM has been a big contributor of Linux to add many of these features to it for their own needs so customers have options. In the last 10 years PC operating systems have slowly been replicating some of the features in the big iron but they are still lacking many fundamentals.
Yes you can replace many systems with PC servers but to say you can "easily replace mainframe apps" just doesn't understand the marketplace for these systems. PC based servers are evolving and will eventually have most of those features but as it is right now your comment just doesn't ring true.
I think many of you under estimate the tangible and non-tangible costs of migrating away from a mainframe.