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."

Comments

Re:Funny!

[Konster]

You are right, neither SNL nor these are funny.

Funny?

[homer_s]

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.

Just curious

[SirSlud]

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.

Re:Just curious

[gEvil (beta)]

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...

Lies!

[ImTheDarkcyde]

This article has NOTHING to do with a comibinatin of Reboot and The Office

Listen to the bubbles pop

[TopSpin]

Remember the Enron "Why" campaign? When corporations have so much dead wood wandering the halls that this sort of stuff begins to emerge, you should expect mass layoffs. I don't like being the pessimist, but I'll need this on the record when I say I told you so.

You mean...

[__aaclcg7560]

Those IBM ads with the helpless I.T. folks in the trade magazines aren't fake?!

Oh wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to see some coverage of mainframes here on Slashdot once and a while. Even more so when it's these videos.

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.

Re:Oh wow

[btarval]

Mainframes are absolutely competitive. The main reason why people have stuck with mainframes is IO bandwidth. The PC solutions (even clustered) just can't touch the channel architecture, and never have been able to.

The second main reason why people go with mainframes is that it's more cost-effective to centralize your compute resources in one system, when it comes to maintenance, for many solutions. One single rack or so is a heck of a lot easier to maintain than a Beowulf cluster of boxes, particularly if the latter are scattered.

So yes, for certain niches, mainframes are the way to go.

Re:Oh wow

[SillyNickName4me]

I once by curiosity found this excellent article describing AS/400 pricing systems.

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 :) ), 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?

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.

Definitely IBM's doing

[Sean0michael]

No need for alleging here. When you go to IBM's Site for Mainframes, you see that the tag line under the photo is "Breakthrough Economics, Security, and Energy Efficiency." They are the three points from the three videos. It doesn't get any more plain than that.

...and the IBM website at the end of the clips.

Re:Eek. Boring

[mccalli]

I am so out of touch with the funny bone in this type of humor. I had to google for Ricky Gervais to find out who he is. I know some of my friends love the Office but... I tried to watch that "Microsoft video" and wanted to snooze after five minutes. The IBM one was even faster.

Ricky Gervaise is brilliant at what he does, but I'm in the same position as you and can't really appreciate it. Slightly different reason though - I find comedy that makes me squirm hard to watch. The Office (UK, I've never seen the US version) is very cutting and accurate for so many places. Trouble is, being in those places makes me want to squirm and so seeing it reproduced on screen also makes me want to squirm.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Offtopic: flash download

[naapo]

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/

Re:I like guerilla marketing

[gEvil (beta)]

There's another commercial for some hemorrhoid cream "from the makers of Head On." I'm scared that soon there'll be commercials saying "Apply directly to asshole. Apply directly to asshole. Apply directly to asshole."