IBM flings FUD at Neon zPrimers

This is IBM last bastion

IBM is out of printers, desktops, laptops, and who knows what else. Why? Because it cannot sustain their huge profit margins with that hardware in an "open" world. Mainframes are their last point of contact before they actually lose the final "M" on their name, and the one where they are fiercely resisting any competition. Talk about Microsoft.

And they know that their Global Services division is mostly a herd of people hired via outsourcing agreements, they know that these people are not competitive, and they know that their idea of moving everything to places where labor is dead cheap is not working, as customers are running away from their Global Services as fast as they are moving things to Eastern Europe or India.

Good luck, IBM, the profit levels of the past are gone. But I'm sure that the top executives have already cashed their bonuses from that.

No shit!

"..... the company's techies are trying to figure out how it works so they can stop it."

They've got form here. I remember some time back in the early AS/400 days, the only tape device you could get officially for the "400 in a box" units was an internal QIC. Yeah. Right. Very funny. Fortunately a few OEM were knocking out DAT and 8mm helical scan drives that masqueraded as an IBM QIC drive, sat externally with a SCSI ribbon cable fed through the front of the box and attached to the internal SCSI tower. Worked a treat and both the QIC and external drive were usable, handy as the QIC drive was needed for upgrades, patches and such.

One day I sat down to upgrade a "B" class box to an "E" class (a process that involves at one point sitting on the floor next to an empty case surrounded by AS/400 parts). On completion, I fired the thing up and the external drive no longer worked. They'd changed the firmware on the later models so it knew damned well that only one QIC drive could be fitted and absobloodylutely refused to configure two devices, even though it could see them on the bus.

It didn't stop you using one, it just made it more complex as, every time you needed the vanilla QIC drive, you had to down the box, swap drives and reboot.

They can be petty minded bastards at IBM sometimes.

@Anonymous Coward -re last bastion

You've never heard of the XBox360, PS3 or Wii then? IBM does the processors for those.

Not good enough? Needs to be a full system?

How about xSeries x86 server line? iSeries? pSeries (AIX running on Power)? Their mixed x86/Cell supercomputer lines?

They do have a huge mainframe business, but that's not all the hardware they do.

(Disclaimer, I work for Big Blue, though nothing I say in any way represents them or their official views)