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From: bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.questions,news.groups
Subject: Re: Hamilton Group Announcement
Message-ID: <22957@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 27 May 88 15:57:36 GMT
References: <7147@swan.ulowell.edu> <233@mcf.UUCP> <3248@pdn.UUCP> <4639@dasys1.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 39
In-reply-to: tbetz@dasys1.UUCP's message of 27 May 88 02:19:13 GMT


That's interesting, people think IBM's interest in Unix relates to its
PCs. IBM has a total market of around $2B on PCs (nothing to sneeze at
but...) and a total gross market of about $60B, much of that in
mainframes running MVS.

My thinking is that although there's certainly some interest and
thinking on the PC side it's loss of market leadership in the
mainframe side that would be motivating IBM in general. An IBM
mainframe is an awesome thing for certain types of applications
(particularly huge data bases) but that alone would probably not keep
them afloat (how many Mastercards or JC Penney's are there in the
world? And they won't change for a long time to come for various
reasons, software investment being a major one, I heard JC Penney's
had something like 20 3081's in the room a few years back and still
couldn't keep up with the sort/merge's.)

A lot of that mainframe market is being threatened by the new
super-minis in a serious way (ie. if a 10 MIPs 3081 with 3MB/sec
channels [~$6M] was good enough for your needs three years ago how
much have you *really* grown that you can't do the same thing on a
current under $1M super-mini? Is a 3090/600E a bit overblown for your
needs today? is it worth putting up with MVS anymore?)

Of course, most of that concern at the moment is doubtless in the govt
market (Federal Systems) I would imagine (that sentence reads
strangely, I'll leave it tho.) One area they seem to have fallen flat
is first the 43xx and now the 9370, there really isn't much mid-range
to their product line anymore (System/36 and 38 excepted, but that
line is aging real fast, I know less about it so I'll stop there.)

I guess all I'm trying to say is that if you find the above rather
complicated and full of stuff you don't usually think about or are
aware of I'd say to stay away from the IBM speculating business, and
I'm sure the above remarks are seriously incomplete in many respects,
such as looking at what divisions of IBM are doing what as they act
rather autonomously.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University