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Compuware Brings IBM to Antitrust Court

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dragging-them-back dept.

pcs305 writes " According to a news article at Yahoo, Compuware is accusing IBM of stealing code and copying Compuware manuals. They also accuse IBM of being a monopoly in the mainframe market and of anti-competitive behaviour. "

4 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. This is "anti-competitive"? by nigelthellama · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the article:

    "The Compuware suit says Armonk, New York-based IBM uses its massive Global Services arm, the world's largest computer consultancy, to steer customers to its own products even when products made by other software vendors may be more suitable."

    How is this somehow wrong? This is called "sales" in the real world. Sales people specialize in getting potential customers to use their product even "when products made by other software vendors may be more suitable", it's what they're paid to do. Yes, IBM may have a large sales department, and yes, maybe they do try to get people to buy their products even when a competitor's products might work better, but this the nature of sales, and is hardly anti-competitive.

    1. Re:This is "anti-competitive"? by nurightshu · · Score: 5, Informative

      Agreed.

      I work for UPS, and we're currently working with the Teamsters Union on contract negotiations for all of our union employees. FedEx has taken the opportunity to lure some of our current customers away from us, by talking up the possibility of another strike like the one in '97. It's so remote as to be almost an impossibility (that strike caused a huge financial dent in the Teamsters' strike reserves), but it doesn't stop them from using it as a marketing tool.

      Should UPS sue FedEx over their sales force's marketing tactics? I don't think so. Most of my fellow employees don't think so either. We'll simply press on and complete the negotiations, while we continue delivering the packages, same as always. If we can't, we sink. Simple as that.

      Business is a fairly brutal Darwinian process sometimes, and if Compuware can't handle the fact that IBM's sales weasels are slick fast-talkers, maybe they should find another line of work. I hear that selling watercress sandwiches in front of the airport is pretty lucrative...

      --
      They that would sacrifice their .sig space for that cliched Franklin quote deserve neither.
  2. Re:IBM a monopoly in the mainframe market? by neurojab · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Make no mistake... the world runs on IBM mainframes. All other systems and os's are fledgling for small players only. From airports, to financial institutions to nearly every one of the Fortune 500... they all use IBM mainframes for their core business. The reason isn't because it's a monopoly... there are always other options, but would you rather pin your business on a 50 node cluster of failure-prone DELL boxes (that may catch fire at any minute) or a slick, bulletproof mainframe? It's just good business sense to buy reliability. No one else can offer that yet.

  3. Let's look at this the other way.... by Gollo · · Score: 5, Insightful


    For years IBM stayed well out of the mainframe database tools market, instead it was dominated by tools from Platinum (now CA, I believe), BMC, Compuware and others. To be realistic, you couldn't really run DB2 effectively without some of these tools.

    Then all of a sudden IBM announces that they are going to begin selling competing tools (not bundled, but separately priced products) and the 3rd party vendors were screaming.

    Why? Yes, they would have cause to be unhappy about the new competition, but one would think that their products would be technically superior in the short term (having been around for 10 years) and too well-entrenched in many shops to be easily surplanted.

    Well, it actually turns out that some of these products actually didn't do much themselves. They were basically fancy front ends to code that IBM supplied with DB2 that wasn't entirely easy to access (only programmatically). We are not talking just basic funtionality here, were talking enhanced processing. IBM discovers this, and realizes that these vendors are really riding IBM's gravy train (and anyone who has ever looked at mainframe software costs will understand how much these vendors charge for a 'front-end'). So now IBM separates that code from DB2 and ships it (and their own front end) as a separate product. What does that mean for a 3rd party vendor? That if you want to use their product, you also have to have the equivalent IBM product installed. No brainer, really.

    As far as I'm concerned, the 3rd party vendors deserve to get shafted here. I've seen how much they charge - and they couldn't even be bothered to write a decent tool that could ever possibly compete with an IBM supplied one...

    Anyway, that's the story as I heard it..... YMMV.