Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!husc6!bu-cs!bucsb.bu.edu!madd From: madd@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP (Jim "Jack" Frost) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc Subject: Re: DOS 3.3 upgrade (IBM bashing) Message-ID: <1077@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP> Date: Sat, 1-Aug-87 20:35:20 EDT Article-I.D.: bucsb.1077 Posted: Sat Aug 1 20:35:20 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 2-Aug-87 10:20:30 EDT References: <2090@sphinx.uchicago.edu> Reply-To: madd@bucsb.bu.edu.UUCP (Jim "Jack" Frost) Distribution: na Organization: ODO (Organization for the Disorganization of Organization) Lines: 134 In article <2090@sphinx.uchicago.edu> pre1@sphinx.UUCP (Grant Prellwitz) writes: >I used to think that the IBM bashing that went on here was a little excessive >at times. Now I'm not so sure. Oh boy. If you don't think IBM needs some bashing, you've been in a closet. Never before have I seen a company that cares so little for their customers. Never. I've been dealing with them for only 3 years and I'm sick of it. You want an IBM product? Pay 20 to 30% more than the price of competitive models, expect poorer performance, gamble on IBM saying "forget this" and moving on to other products, expect to pay 1% of the price of what you paid for it in monthly maintenance (this works out to be a substantial amount of money each year, BTW, but is often necessary because the reliability of some of IBM's equipment is horrendous). Care to discuss my reasons for these statements? Here they come: Price: compare the pricing of IBM's micros to competition. If you're not suitably convinced, look at what you get for your money when you buy a System/36. A sun workstation is about as powerful and much, much cheaper. Performance: IBM came out with an AT that COULD have been run at 8MHz initially. Why didn't they do this? More recently, IBM shipped PS/2 model 50s with 80ms hard drives. The model 50 is some 20% faster than the AT (this is brought up a LOT in their new catalog), yet the AT has a 35ms drive. Why? In the mainframe world, IBM in the past has charged large amounts of money for a "hardware upgrade" that boosted system performance by considerable amounts. This upgrade consisted of removing a jumper. Nice going, IBM. Support: IBM has in the past just dropped items with zero support for their loyal customers. The best case for this is the famed Datamaster system, which was the precursor of the PC. It was a horrid machine that only understood BASIC, gave numeric errors (eg ERROR 2048), had the same ghastly keypad as the PC, used 8" diskettes, and was dreadfully slow. Not surprisingly it did not sell well. IBM dropped the machine and all support. Maintenance: IBM maintenance is costly. We had an IBM System/32 (quite a reliable machine) who's maintenance cost was $600/month. The machine had an initial cost of about $60000. What warrants such costly maintenance? I saw the IBM guy in our office just twice in over two years; certainly the maintenance was overpriced in this case. Sometimes hate maintenance people cannot even find the problem. For instance, one rather large organization I am associated with bought an IBM mainframe a while ago. After the system was installed, key people noticed that its performance was something like half of what IBM advertised it to be. Assuming a problem, they called in maintenance. Nobody found anything wrong. Later, one of the people operating the machine noticed a wire that went between a couple of contacts. This wire held the machine in sort of a hardware test state, cutting its performance by some 50%. And the maintenance people never found it. On a good note, IBM agreed to buy some non-IBM equipment for said institution in order not to have this event publicised (and, I'm sure, not to be sued). The details of this event are not distributed because I don't think I'm even supposed to know about it. Reliability: How many people own an IBM PC? A real one? Now, how many have had problems (initially) with it? In my experience, all but one of the IBM PC systems owned by people I knew were flawed when they purchased them. I admit that current releases have done much better, but even the AT had problems with its hard drives initially. Anyone care to comment about IBM mainframe reliability? On other ground, why is it that the people who built the Selectric II, which set the standard for typewriter key formats, took THREE MAJOR REVISIONS of their PC keyboard before getting it right? Stupid. Just plain stupid. The best way to a customer's heart is through his data access devices. Give a typist a good keyboard and they'll ignore all kinds of other problems -- I know, I am a typist. I'd rather work on my ancient Kaypro (best keyboard ANYWHERE for typing) than on an IBM AT, although the software on the AT is much, much better. Also, notice the horrid flickering of some of the IBM video boards. The person who allowed the public to see that should have been tortured and killed slowly. It gives even dedicated IBM lovers a headache inside of ten minutes. Now, let's talk about IBM software. Have you ever seen a really good software package made by IBM? I have not. Ever. Reviewers often call it mediocre at best. I have to deal with just one IBM package on a regular basis -- DisplayWrite. Now, Displaywrite is a pretty nice package. It does nice formatting, has a great spelling checker, and looks neat. But it's excruciatingly painful to use. When you want to delete from the beginning of a line to the end of another, you hit delete and then return. Since DisplayWrite automatically wraps words, this is really, really annoying to people who are accustomed to just backspacing their errors and blasting away. On other ground, this particular package supports almost no printers. Specifically, it does not support even one laserprinter. (Well, DisplayWrite III doesn't -- I haven't used DW4.) Grr. And the cost for this program? Hundreds. Other, much much better, wordprecessors go for much less and do much more. For example, PC-Write supports some 400 printers and ten laserprinters. It supports 35 Hewlett-Packard font sets alone. WordPerfect supports quite a few, too. And we won't even talk about Microsoft Word or Lotus Manuscript, whose main thing in life seems to be making awesome looking text. Oh, one more thing. IBM wanted the PC version of Displaywrite to be compatible with files from their bigger machines, so they made the files all EBCDIC (even though you need special conversion stuff just to pull it off the floppy from the other system -- why didn't they just give you a neat utility to convert?). I've done some major bashing here. In general, my complaints about IBM come from their braindamaged look at customers. At least as far as computers go, their attitude has been poor (at best). Rule number one of surviving: do not bite the hand that feeds you. While IBM is big enough and strong enough to survive the clone wars, the days are coming (quickly, I may add) when the big mainframes will be threatened by new, cheap, user-friendly mainframes by other companies. Unless they change their tune before then, IBM is going to be a hurting unit when that day comes. Are you listening, IBM? Or do user complaints still go in one ear and out the other? %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Jim Frost * The Madd Hacker | UUCP: ..!harvard!bu-cs!bucsb!madd H H | ARPA: madd@bucsb.bu.edu H-C-C-OH <- heehee +---------+---------------------------------- H H | "We are strangers in a world we never made"