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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Back in my electric fish days I helped my French friend “Bullet” Micheloud develop a computer simulation.

Bullet had laboriously collected sex ratio data on two species of fig wasps (if you like Fig Newtons you don’t want to know – trust me). We ran the simulation on a Texas Instruments programmable calculator because I was a weenie, but not enough of a weenie to use a Hewlett Packard. We based our simulation on the theory of sex ratio selection, and predicted his results pretty well.

Back then we knew the difference between mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers: Mainframes had 32 bits, minis had 16 bits, and micros had 8. It was simple, clear, and easy to keep track of.

Now it’s all a matter of opinion, and it’s my opinion that the mainframe is dead, despite the thirty-seven articles you’ve just read declaring “The Big Iron is Back”. It’s IBM that’s back, and you can learn from its strategy … after I put another nail in the mainframe’s coffin.

The mainframe really is dead, and IBM just killed it. It still sells boxes it calls mainframes, but that’s just marketing.

Have you seen these puppies? They’re the size of a big file server. They’re built around a bunch of microprocessors. They include the whole AIX API, according to IBM – in other words, UNIX.

IBM can call this a mainframe if it wants, it can tell me it now runs AIX on its mainframes, and it can repeats its mantra that “the mainframe is just the biggest server on the network”.

Heck, IBM can explain that teenagers from Arcturus get bored on Saturday nights, fly to Earth, make big circles in cornfields, and then laugh hysterically at the stupid Terrans who come to gawk.

It can tell me this all it wants, but that won’t make me believe it.

IBM could have announced that it had ported MVS to its midrange computers instead. It’s all in how you look at it, of course, and if it makes Big Blue happy to call its new superserver a teeny weeny mainframe, well, so be it.

Regardless, we’re all going to wake up one day soon and discover something remarkable. IBM, while we weren’t paying attention but in plain sight, will have transformed its entire product line into a single platform, built around PowerPC technology. All of its boxes will be able to run MVS, AIX, and OS/400, and Windows NT as well.

Who knows? Rhapsody may run on it, too, now that Apple has survived Larry Ellison’s silly takeover idea. (I never could understand why someone who hates the idea of stand-alone PCs as much as Ellison wanted a company that caters to the most rabidly independent PC users on the planet.)

This forecast doesn’t bode well for OS/2, of course, but very little has bade well for OS/2 since IBM took it over from Microsoft.

Now about that career lesson:

Think of the technology marketplace as an employer, and IBM as a corporate executive who took some highly public mis-steps and found his career in the doldrums. It happens in every large company, and it can happen to you.

If you don’t want to find other employment and you do want to resuscitate your career, you can take some lessons from IBM right now. IBM first did everything wrong, announcing semi-annual reorganizations, pricing changes, and a variety of incomprehensible strategies – it was in denial. It has since found the right answer: Great engineering and solid execution. It has started to stick to its knitting so it will have real successes to point to, while the nonsense fades into memory and its rival overplays its hand.

If your career has taken a wrong turn, follow IBM’s current strategy: Stick to your own knitting and amass some clear successes. Ask for a project or problem area to clean up, drop out of sight for awhile, and do a lot of stuff right. Eventually, your own nonsense will fade into memory, and your own rivals will overplay their hands.

There are worse ways to succeed.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Facts are hazardous in this business, and I do my best to avoid them. Opinions are much safer.

Occasionally, though, something tangible belongs in the dialog, so here’s what an InfoWorld reader has to say. I’ve done a bit of editing to ensure anonymity. Otherwise, the text reads pretty much as I received it.

“I run IT for the Acme Corporation (yes, the one Wiley Coyote orders from). We’re semi-autonomous from the corporate DP department. DP wants to correct this condition. We don’t.

“My area manages 120 PCs, and have a total budget of $1.3 million, so there’s your $11K per PC. ‘Grand total’ includes a $400K tithe to DP (they figure their costs and send a non-negotiable bill). Do I split it out as ‘mainframe’ costs, ‘network’ costs, ‘PC service’ costs? No way. DP pretends to, but admits the numbers are largely made up.

“(I sometimes wonder how much is going to pay for their middle managers sitting around talking about ‘architecting the meta-data in the Zachmann Framework’, but then, I’m sometimes overly pragmatic.)

“Even in my own area, how do I separate the costs of projects from the infrastructure to make the projects work? Not everybody really needs networking, yet everybody gets Banyan, TCP/IP, SQL*Net middleware, because it’s cheaper, smarter, and pro-active to make sure anybody can run anything.

“And besides, the Big Bosses don’t want to hear breakdowns into cost categories they don’t understand in the first place. They take the grand total IT budget including all salaries and divide by the number of seats.

“And now the real bottom line for the big cheese: HE DOESN’T CARE. He has a $100 million/year business to run, so I’m 1.5% of his budget. He’s being nice to give me about 3% of his time, and he only gives me that because my area is ‘strategic’ and rapidly growing. As a line-business person, he’s much more concerned about the benefits than the costs, and he can see with his eyes closed that the benefits are much greater.

“It’s the full-time DP types who aren’t even connected to the business world who care about the costs. Every new machine, every new application, every new layer of middleware is another chore to them, another cost, another problem. They want to hold these down and speak much of simplification, homogenization, and limiting numbers of tool sets. Users agree in principle, but principles drop to the bottom of the priority list when a useful new application for their machine appears.

“I restrain the most enthusiastic end-users, but basically I’m on their side – even though their new uses are also new problems for me. I’m out in the business area and can also see the benefits.

“Sorry for the rant. I’m just trying point out the complexity. The accounting is the least interesting and important part.”

When you put your mental graphs on your mental wall, which of these measures do you chart: corporate value, IS costs, or your migraine level?

Look, I sympathize. Your headaches are my headaches. I feel your pain. (For that matter, my knee hurts, but that’s another subject.) Unfortunately, you’re paid to have headaches, and a reduction in your headache load doesn’t automatically translate to corporate value.

Reducing your costs doesn’t translate to corporate value either. If it did you’d resign immediately, reducing the cost of you to zero. You’d get rid of your headaches, too.

IS typically represents between 1% and 3% of a company’s total budget. Now be realistic here – how much of that can you really save by reducing your PC cost of ownership? The guess from here: even if you replace all your PCs with NCs and work really hard, your savings won’t amount to even a blip on the radar screen.

You have to decide where you’re going to focus your attention. You get much more leverage out of value creation than cost reduction. As reported last week, I once generated a 4,000% ROI with a single spreadsheet. Think of how much return you can generate by providing really great support for all of your company’s spreadsheet users.

And that’s just the tip of the old iceberg.

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