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Mainframe Meets 'The Office'
BBCWatcher writes "Tom Foremski (a.k.a. Silicon Valley Watcher) claims that IBM is doing some guerilla marketing for the mainframe. The three videos, now on YouTube, show how IBM allegedly trains new mainframe salespeople, in the style of the BBC's "The Office." IBM's videos arrive in the midst of a Microsoft "Office" controversy. Microsoft was not amused when somebody leaked internal training videos from 2004 that feature Ricky Gervais, The Office man himself. Gervais wasn't happy either."
There's a Firefox plugin for just that purpose. It also supports Google Video and a ton of other sites. The videos in YouTube are actually "flash video" (.flv), not Flash per se. You can play them with e.g. "mplayer" (not the same as Windows Media Player).
Firefox plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/
MPlayer: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
I once by curiosity found this excellent article describing AS/400 pricing systems.
:) ), and I guess IBM still has a very good salesforce to get their stuff out, but how long can they keep this up with pricing systems like this?
AS/400s are mini computers, not mainframes..
And I was shocked. If you buy the low-end version, you already have the full power chip, but just slowed down. For about $ 20k per processor you can unlock that, but that will also require you to buy another license, for several additional k$ per processor.
Usually that also comes with on-site service and the like of a kind that Dell and friends haven't heard of yet.
Also check the price/performance comparison for competing UNIX and Linux systems shown there. What kind of pricing system is that?
I don't know this particular study, but I'd mostly be looking for an AS/400 if I'm looking for something to run a huge database, not hundreds of virtual machines.
I can imagine the hardware is a bit more stable etc, but relative performance of the Power PC is not as good it used to be.
The performance of a machine depends on a lot more then the CPU however. IO bandwidth is a major factor in performance, esp. when the dataset you work on gets substantially bigger then fits in cache or even main memory.
Hence looking at the cpu architecture is not going to tell you much about a system which specializes in IO bandwidth (mainframe class computers)
Stability of hardware, possibility to replace hardware without taking the system down and such are also part of the picture of course, but not unique to mainframe hardware.
Still IBM is probably just asking prices that it thinks it can get away with. Why are they doing this?
Uh, because they are a business and are in it for the money?
And, wouldn't someone else be able to use commodity chips (some workstation-grade core 2 duo or opteron) and build a robust system out of that, for only part of they price they ask.
Seeing the amounts of money going around in that market, someone would have tried.. As a matter of fact, people tried more then once, and in the mid 90s the mainframe market looked dead and it looked like commodity hardware was outdating it. Somehow, this never really happened however.
Thomas J. Watson was a very good salesman (a bit too good to be legal
Untill someone beats them at it or the market just dissapears.. Right now however it looks like they beat everyone who tried to beat them.
Welcome to the real world where businesses exist to 'produce shareholder value', or more generally, are in it for the money.
How naive do you have to be to be a Microsoft employee that had this brainchild and think that wouldn't get leaked about 5 minutes after video was made available to programmers?
Well, considering TFA says that the videos were made in 2004, it took about 2 years before the programmers got their hands on them...
This guy's the limit!