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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."
It is as funny as a coporately funded, PHB-driven campaign could ever be.
But the IBM employees who are forced to watch this will laugh though. They better.
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? The most powerful government in the world leaks shit all the time; I read the whole MS reaction as more of a predictable corperate response for the benifit of shareholder confidance than I do an actual admission of surprise.
Maybe thats even sadder, that this is a good proof of existance of people who hold stock who interpret this kind of leak to be a reflection on the internal controls of corperate communication.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Those IBM ads with the helpless I.T. folks in the trade magazines aren't fake?!
The mainframe market tanked in the 90's. In the past year it's starting to see some life in it again. There's even one company of former Amdahl people who are doing mainframes with Linux (and z/OS on top of it). Here's the link: http://www.platform-solutions.com/
Disclaimer: I know some of these people.
Honestly, without some sort of life, and especially competition, the mainframe market was looking quite dead. Which would be a pity, as mainframes are still quite cool in the niche they fill.