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Microsoft-Backed Firm Says IBM Is Anticompetitive
BBCWatcher writes "Microsoft has long claimed that the mainframe is dead, slain by the company's Windows monopoly. Yet, apparently without any mirror nearby, Microsoft is now complaining through the Microsoft-funded Computer & Communications Industry Association that not only are mainframes not dead, but IBM is so anticompetitive that governments should intervene in the hyper-competitive server market. The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is worried that the trend toward cloud computing is introducing competition to the Windows franchise, favoring better-positioned companies including IBM and Cisco. HP now talks about almost nothing but the IBM mainframe, with no Tukwila CPUs to sell until 2010. The global recession is encouraging more mainframe adoption as businesses slash IT costs, dominated by labor costs, and improve business execution. In 2008, IBM mainframe revenues rose 12.5% even whilst mainframe prices fell. (IBM shipped 25% more mainframe capacity than in 2007. Other server sales reports are not so good.) IBM mainframes can run multiple operating systems concurrently, including Linux and, more recently, OpenSolaris."
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
T3 contends that IBM pens in mainframe customers faced with a high cost of switching to other systems, while refusing to share blueprints necessary to offer a cheaper alternative.
I'm not a hardware guy and I'm no fan of IBM but I must be missing something here: what is it about mainframes that makes them so different from servers?
Tampa-based T3 develops mainframe technology compatible with IBM software that is designed for small and midsize enterprises.
Maybe they can't release details but I'm guessing that there's some proprietary chipsets and microcontrollers inside these things to run the (what are they at 32 or 64 processors) CPUs stacked on top of each other and banks of memory and storage and database crap. So what you've gotten software written specifically to take advantage of this stuff? And it's going to be hard to move to another mainframe or standardized servers with that stuff? Are you surprised? It'd be like if I wrote something for Windows and then complained I couldn't get the blueprint from Windows of how the API works so I could move to a "cheaper solution" like Linux.
So if T3 wins this case, what's the ideal outcome? IBM open sources the software that runs on these mainframes? IBM releases detailed chipset information? Both are laughable. And if you're going to argue that, you might as well argue that Microsoft open up Windows or Intel layout the insides of its Atom processors for the world to see.
I wish I didn't find myself defending IBM (I hate their software and these mainframes sound like a scam) but you have to draw the line somewhere or apply to everyone. My advice to the poor companies still at the hands of IBM: get out. Of course that's my advice to anyone foolish enough to buy into vendor "lock-in" software like Flash. Lesson learned: An extra layer of well defined and thought out abstraction will add a bit of overhead but in the end it might save your ass when you need to switch technologies.
My work here is dung.
The mainframe is a dead relic of times past surely?
I love the cyclical nature of all this stuff.
they know all about being anticompetitive.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A huge IBM add posted on slashdot that looks like MS bashing. Really clever.
What, you mean computers were actually capable of opening more than one window at a time?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
...and not just the titles. The HP one is talking about HP pushing for people to migrate off mainframes. Onto HP servers. Running Windows Server 2003.
Microsoft is now complaining ......... IBM is so anticompetitive that governments should intervene.
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Well, I think it's more a case of "we got hosed in Europe so let's see if we can turn this same sword on our competitors." From the article:
The CCIA now has added encouragement from a tiny firm backed by IBM rival Microsoft Corp., which has lodged an antitrust complaint in Europe, while pressing a related lawsuit in federal court in New York and sounding out U.S. regulators.
Microsoft's been picked over with a fine toothed comb by the EU recently and I think their strategy now is to make sure everyone else is too. If you look at it that way, Microsoft has nothing to lose. They've been scrutinized to the fullest extent and you should expect them to turn this same scrutiny over to other companies in other fields. I wouldn't be surprised to see a sort of anti-competitive gaming lawsuit aimed at Nintendo come about one of these days in the EU.
My work here is dung.
Wait, if the server market is hyper-competetive, then there's no serious anti-trust issue right? I mean, would you call the desktop OS market "hyper-competetive"?
Facebook is the new AOL
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!
Yeah, but you know... they could be right.
Say I'm littering in your front yard. Then you start playing obnoxiously loud music in the middle of the night.
Should I be barred from suing you for being a nuisance, just because I'm a nuisance myself?
If you argue yes, I think the reasoning becomes even thinner than I think it has to be for that case when we're talking about this:
One party does something bad towards not any one particular party but society as a whole. Then, another party points to the first party and says "they're doing it, so we can do it to" and go on to do something bad against society.
True, Microsoft isn't on the moral high ground, but that doesn't excuse IBM. And it doesn't make it incorrect for Microsoft to point it out. Just... the weird kind of funny.
disclaimer: I don't know the facts of the case. I don't know whether IBM is being anticompetitive. I'm not well-enough informed to hold an informed opinion, so I won't state one. I'm just saying that if IBM is being anticompetitive...
IBM makes the hardware & software to work together as a complete marketable unit, if microsoft wants to compete in the mainframe market then they better build their own mainframe & software to run on it as a complete unit ready for market, and quit bitching about being anti-competitive bunch of damn hypocrites...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We need more details about what anti-competitive things IBM is doing. OK, it sells machines that seem to give customers more value for money, in their perception, while still making massive profits. Lucky IBM, but isn't that what business is all about? What have they been doing to stop others competing with them - if they can? Have they been saying that you cannot connect Windows machines to their mainframes? Have they been refusing to run Microsoft software (if you can get the appropriate license) on their virtual machines? Or what else?
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Windows 95 is a
32-bit shell for a
16-bit extension to an
8-bit operating system designed for a
4-bit microprocessor by a
2-bit company that can't stand
one bit of competition.
(stolen from http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-users/2003-May/018396.html)
Also, "two-bit" means "(1) cheap; gaudy; tawdry; or (2) Mediocre, inferior, or insignificant".
(stolen from http://www.yourdictionary.com/two-bit. Try to find the definition in-between all the ads.)
The sad part is that IBM only became a monopoly in the mainframe market because no one else wanted to make and sell them anymore. So now people are thinking about mainframes again for things like cloud computer and suddenly the argument is that IBM is not allowing competition in the market. Maybe if other companies didn't abandon the mainframe market, there would be more than just IBM left standing in it. The issue though is not whether they are a monopoly in that market (which they are, probably just as much as Microsoft is on the desktop market), but are they using it to prevent competition from others or in other markets?
IBM in no way forces a customer to use their systems. At any time, a customer could leave and move to another setup.
It sounds like the issue is competitors want IBM to release more details on how things are engineered, so they can design solutions for people who want to transition from IBM to other products.
IBM stuck with their investment and are positioned to make some great cash of this. The other companies need to make their own solutions that are good enough to win over customers. Lawyers have way to much time on their hands imo.
IBM is "anti competitive" because it is beating the crap out of MS in the new environment. I don't remember IBM screaming when MS was riding high on cheap Windows servers displacing mainframes. And MS was lying through their teeth. At the time, the Windows servers were nowhere near as reliable as the mainframe. Just cheaper.
True enough.. In fact the 'VM' operating system for the current zSeries dates back to 1972. I used to work with it, it has ability to take snapshots, work on top of a base image, all that stuff. Not the VMware style either, we're talking true hardware level virtualization. In fact, when I first heard of VMWare I thought "neat, it's like PCs can do something like a mainframe can do".
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
A system Z mainframe is always run in virtualization. That's been one of their big features.
In terms of 'cloud', the term is so ill-defined and buzzed it's hard to say much, but generally speaking, a 'cloud' on a mainframe is not any less possible than a 'cloud' on disparate x86 rackmount servers.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Say I'm littering in your front yard. Then you start playing obnoxiously loud music in the middle of the night.
Should I be barred from suing you for being a nuisance, just because I'm a nuisance myself?
Yeah, but I'm not sure it's really like that. AFAICT it's almost more like if you were littering and the trash blew over into your neighbor's yard, and then you complained to the neighborhood association that your neighbor wasn't taking good enough care of their yard, because it was covered in trash.
If IBM is dominant, it seems like it's at least partially because they're the one left standing after Microsoft leveraged their monopoly to drag the whole market in a different direction.
But sir thats the point - It is difficult to make an informed decision when the information recieved is from Microsoft.
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Well... I take it you weren't around back in the days when IBM was every bit as vile a monopolist as Microsoft is now. Look up some of the writings of Rex Malik (in England) or Nancy Foy (in the US), and read about the history of IBM. I personally would have loved it had Burroughs prevailed.
Should I be barred from suing you for being a nuisance, just because I'm a nuisance myself?
Yes. It is called "unclean hands" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unclean_hands).
You being a jackass undermines your suit against me being a jackass.
Microsoft calling anyone anti-competitive should result in the court bursting out in raucous laughter.
I am anarch of all I survey.
The interesting part here is that Microsoft used a sock-puppet company for those statements.
Has MS come out and say it themselves it wouldn't be quite the news it is.
Has microsoft ever had a mainframe? No.
Do they have a mainframe OS? no.
Could they develop one? HPC could theoretically be considdered one if they added storage virtualization to it, and a few other mainframe class systems.
Would we use a microsoft OS to replace out IBM mainframes? No. I'll elaborate:
- We have MILLIONS of lines of code ON the mainframe that would ALL have to be completely re-done from scratch to move off the OS390 platform.
- We have 10 times that much code that would have to be modified to talk to a non-OS390 mainframe.
- We have hundreds of servers that run support applications for the mainframe or mainframe apps that don't run on Windows.
- Any competing platform uses far more space and many fold more power, and does not have the HA features of true mainframes.
- A LARGE part of the security of our mainframe environment is that since you can't exactly get access to OS390 easily, hacing it is damned near impossible... Moving to a windows kernel based mainframe would NOT be adviseable even if we could afford it.
- IBM is here, and has been for decades, and there's more legacy code running on OS390 that's 10 years old than code running on it that's less than 10 years old. they're NOT going to drop support for it. I can't say that about any competitor.
- IBM has a FULL suite of tools to manage, monitor, and protect the mainframe. Most technologies entering the x64 space now have been in use on mainframes for 5-10 years... some longer.
- Licensing prices on the mainframe are a FRACTION of the price of lecensing x86 and P6 systems. (we're saving about 10 million this year in licensing alone moving a few hundred machines to Suse Linux virtualised on z10 IFL processors.)
- Component hardware costs of the mainframe are a bit higher (about $8K for a gig of RAM), but the system as a whole is actually not only cheaper than an equivalent VMWare or hypervisor supercluster, but it;s energy use is also a fraction of the equivalent.
- the Z systems have 5-10 year lifespans, we have a few running 12 years without a critical outage, not 3-5 years like all other platforms...
We pay a never-ending maintenance plan on our mainframes. We add new ones every year or two to replace old ones, but we don't really "buy" new mainframes, we simply pay to have a base number of MIPS available and IBM keeps the hardware running. (and pay to increase those MIPS as necessary. The licensing and hardware costs are FAR lower than out other platforms.
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
Microsoft can't call IBM anti-competitive; I'm sure IBM already has patents on technologies related to "methods by which a pot calls a kettle black".
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It seems that You assume that the only, or only successfully, way to compete with IBM is to use the same machine architecure and operating system.
You could really compete with Your own software and hardware. Yes, it's not as easy but there have been several such competitors. And it should be easier now when the bigger part of the customer applications is in 3:rd or higher level programming languages (e g COBOL).
There is of course a tough task to build up the whole hardware infrastructure to be able to deliver high mainframe reliability. OTOH, if You skip support of IBM legacy assembler You can skip all the backward compatibility mess that IBM have to deal with in every new version of the OS (and also hardware).
Mundus Vult Decipi
Microsoft has plenty of money. If they don't like the way the mainframe market looks then they should enter and build their own. IBM has already been through the anti-trust wringer for their mainframe hardware and has spent decades under supervision by the Justice Department.
The article is missing the fact that T3 bought it's technology from Platform Solutions. Platform Solutions was acquired by IBM. Without reselling Platform Solutions' product I don't see how T3 has any offerings that IBM competes with. They look like a distributor that has been cut off form a supplier, that's not grounds for anti-trust.
http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/publications/oep/version1/reference/eram/ Host Computer System is a G3 mainframe running code from the 1960's/70's, although the FAA is on-schedule to replace it by 2012 with non-mainframe computers.
Now, *that's* a "business critical" application!
How does IBM's practices in the 1960s and 1970s relate to the companies that were competing with IBM in the mainframe marketplace in the 1990s? Fujitsu and Hitachi, both huge corporations with substantial financial resources, were competing with IBM in the 1990s with mainframe compatible systems. Both Fujitsu and Hitachi decided they had better places to invest funds than developing mainframe servers. Both Fujitsu and Hitachi lacked IBM's faith in the technology and vision of where it could go. IBM is now reaping the benefits of its decision to continue investing substantial funds in mainframe R&D while many in the industry were declaring the technology a relic of a bygone era.
> Why would anyone spend huge sums of $ on a mainframe and the scarce mainframe
> programmers to keep it running, just to run a virtualized copy of linux?
So that you can run ten thousand copies of linux. Virtualized at the hardware level.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yes but mission critical wintel deployment it's probably a lot more expansive in terms of redudancy and support cost then the older mainframes. when they grow to the scale where mainframes used to live.
Windows biggest drawback stability wise was always that it had none and now only week self protection features, a renegade application will take a wintel host down while a mainframe will remain mostly unaffected by bad application code. With properly tested application code you can make a wintel stable, but thats not all that common in the cloud world where almost everything is perpertual beta and to keep that stable you need a underlying platform who can protect itself the way windows can't. especially if your going to rent out the hardware on a timeshare basis, to almost anyone. Unix/Linux remains as always the middle ground it runs on any hardware(now even clasical mainframes) and gets a lot closer to mainframe like behavior then windows.
When microsoft claims that most windows crashes are due to 3rd party code they are actually right, the only problem is that Windows is the making it damn easy for 3rd party code to take the entire system down.
The Microsoft approach with all of the desktop computers networked together is becoming fabulously expensive for support, maintenance, installation, and security. The 'mainframe' computer still connects the desktops but the good stuff (apps and data) is on the 'mainframe' rather than the local desktops so most of the support, maintenance, installation, and security is done on a few of the 'mainframes' rather than the thousands of desktops. The cost advantages of that are so enormous that Microsoft should be attempting to find a way to play in that space by buying companies rather than bellyaching about the anti-competitiveness of IBM. Microsoft has never figured out what they want to do, anyway...video games, corporate computing, home multimedia centers, small business computing, or what? Microsoft wants to do everything but they don't do anything very well.
"Why would IBM and Cisco be better positioned than Microsoft in the cloud?"
.NET (or any MS framework)? the SEC (not the football conf :)? Walmart? Honda? GM? GenDynamics? Westinghouse Nuclear? Insurance Companies? Brokerages? and I'm not talking about their websites.
.Net and it really is mainly a fusion of Java and Delphi.
Because IBM and Cisco are known for their highly scalable frameworks to deal with high-traffic, high-computational applications.
Microsoft has never had a foothold in the enterprise or computational intensive market, ever. Having worked my entire career in high science and industry, I have never seen a mission critical, highly stable and scalable application written on the MS platform (not that they don't exist I'm sure).
Do you think banks use
MS frameworks do not have a history of reliability and scalability for supporting high-traffic mission critical and highly computational applications.
Most MS framework apps I've seen are un-scalable, monotonic desktop apps. Great for spreadsheets, but not so great for running a bank.
The problem is that MS has been way behind for so long, it'll be difficult for them to catch up. You look at
Really, MS is at a dis-advantage because of a history of poor enterprise products.