AT&T Joining OSF

[Jim Frost]

In article <670025 at hpclscu.HP.COM> shankar at hpclscu.HP.COM (Shankar Unni) writes:
|> seems to be Mr. Chambers' point.  OSF will not have to worry about 
|> sales budget, software quality, etc.
|                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|What do you mean by "software quality"? Features? Or lack of bugs? Or a 
|little of both (actually a lot more of the latter than the former)?
|
|How do you think IBM sells anything?  Product quality is usually priority 
|number 1 (like the Ford commercial :-)) at most of the big players in the
|business.  [...]  Hell hath no
|fury like the DP manager whose end-of-the-month payroll run has been disrupted
|by a system failure. 

Hmm.  Wasn't IBM the one that released a version of VM that didn't
bother to save the floating point registers when switching between
VM's, thus causing much havoc -- especially amongst the scientific
communities at several universities which needed to completely
recalculate some huge jobs?  So much for quality amongst the big boys.
Hell hath no fury like the scientist whose thousand-cpu-hours of
calculating is invalidated by the lack of a couple of store
instructions.

|*That* (and not whizz-bang bells and whistles) is what maks the big companies
|big. And keeps them big.

This is partially right.  IBM became big by being reliable; they never
did anything really new so what they had was most likely going to
work.  With the 360 and 370 series machines they got people locked
into an architecture; which was the better thing to do when your
system was too small?  Buy a nice, new, fast machine (real cheap) or
stick with IBM and not have to re-code anything?  Less headaches with
IBM, so they stayed.  In addition to this, IBM's service beat (and
still beats) the competition hands down.  If you have the right
service contract they'll bend over backwards to get you running FAST.
DP people like that.  *THAT'S* why so many of them went with, and stay
with, IBM.  For sure it's not the programmer's choice to work under
MVS ("or any of the other 'S' operating systems" as Barry Shein has
said).

|Shankar.

jim frost
madd at bu-it.bu.edu