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I would like to add some thoughts, or experiences.

First, I, too, am old enough to remember very well the time when relational
database technology was not "common sense", as is is today. I was told in 1985
ca., when I was doing DB2 and SQL classes at a big car manufacturerer's site in
Germany (well-known), that DB2 will never be used there to drive their business.
I ignored that and continued to concentrate on relational DB systems. Some years
later, all applications there were converted to DB2, step by step (I was once
again there, later, doing another class). I'm not working there, any more, but I
have been doing the whole DB2 education for another big customer since 1992,
until today.

Then: I am working as a consultant in some system programming related areas
where IBM tools and software are lacking the needed function from the
application programmers' viewpoint. I am providing the needed function. But it
is always a sort of problem, because the customers can not imagine that I am
able to provide better support in certain areas than IBM, so I have some
problems regarding customers' confidence (and price). I am normally successful,
in the end, but the negociations are not easy sometimes.

Kind regards

Bernd



Am 04.07.2014 21:53, schrieb J.G.:
> I think that IBM long ago concluded that it could not do everything,
> and thus that the existence of other centers of development, the ISVs,
> was and is in its best interests.
>
> The problem with the separate, individual consideration of the
> business cases for extension A, extension B, extension C, . . .  is
> that there may be, often are important synergies among them.  Their
> one-at-a-time evaluation is simplistic.  De minimis is doubtless a
> good doctrine for appelate courts; in the IT industry it is a recipe
> for obsolescence and with it progressive irrelevance.
>
> Worse, economic significance is only easy to evaluate in retrospect.
> (I am old enough to remember when there was vigorous argument within
> IBM about the merits, if any, of relational data base managers like
> DB2.)
>
> Quotations are apparently expected from me, and I will provide one.
>
> No man can have in his mind a conception of the future, for the future
> is not yet.  But of our conceptions of the past, we make a future.
>
>                    --Thomas Hobbes
>
> J.G.
>