There you go again Daniel, playing the roll of the buffoon.

Seriously, what company other than IBM can offer the breadth of products for
$800 including tech support?

Remember there's the entire Rational, Websphere, Tivolli, Information
Management, and Lotus pillars.

Not sure if *all* offering are covered, but when you consider the amount of
product offerings, thats a lot.

I believe that Apple charges Mac OS/X developers $200 a year to be in their
developer group.

The point being is that there is a price associated with the offering. If
you can't find that the value exceeds the offering, then don't spend your
money. If you think that the value exceeds the price, then get the package
deal.

Nobody here's drinking the blue cool-aid, and if you ask people who know me,
they will tell you I never even took a sip. Unlike you, I'm my own man. ;-)

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The baffoon speaks again.

Dude!
The program isn't aimed at students. Actually IBM has a division for
universities, although I don't know who or what they actually do.

The program is geared towards actual developers who are designing and
building real kit to be resold.

Any startup worth their weight will invest in the tools that they will need
to be successful.

an investment of $800 USD is nothing.

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Timmy,

I don't know which turnpike tech you're planning on attending, but the last
time I looked, a full course load at a major university was over $800 for
the quarter.

But again, lets focus on the topic.
IDS isn't a child's toy. Its one of the best designed databases on the
market. You want Microsoft?
Just ask WorldWinner what they found out in their real life comparison
between IDS and Microsoft.

$800.00 is just the cost of doing business.
Considering that most of us Independents are forced to spend $250.00 a year
on liability insurance which does nothing, $800.00 is noise.



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Gumpster,

I think you'd have to be honest and admit you too play the buffoon, especially
with your taglines.

;-)


Anyway, I make pretty good money as a consultant, doing better with Linux
than I ever did with Informix, so even though the $800 USD isn't as big a
hit for me as it might be for others, even you admit it's only a valuable
package if you use the other stuff that's available. You also point out
that Mac folks have to cough up $200 USD, a much more reasonable price. I
also see reasonable prices for other products. But even so, the price is
free for a lot of other database products, and if Informix is ever going
to go beyond just big ticket environments it will have to become unleashed
to the general population at large, without big ticket prices. You also
mentioned MySQL. MySQL database is in operation in hundreds of data centers
right now, without restriction, or cost to the shop. Only when you develop
an application that requires a MySQL runtime, do you pay something. The
rest of the implementations of MySQL as a database are out there for FREE,
even in production environments. I can and often do, compile MySQL on the
platform I want it on to optimize it, and shove it under its own tree. This
doesn't cost MySQL Corp anything, it actually shoves the competition out of
the way, and opens the door for real support from MySQL, and MySQL third-party
products. The point should not be lost that it's only MySQL, rather, MySQL
has done a fantastic job of seeding its market, and is now reaping the harvest
of a strong, loyal group of users. Who cares about its value vs Informix, the
point is, it's all about building market share. Without seeding the market
from the bottom, all IDS will ever be is a database very few people will know
about. It will never reach any market momentum, which is precisely why I
believe next month will be a dud. I _will_ be 100% proven right next month,
you can count on it. It will be a whimper, and yet statistically another
waste of a great opportunity to really bring IDS to the mainstream market.

-t-

Ian Michael Gumby wrote:

On 13 Jun., 22:35, "Ian Michael Gumby" <im_gu... (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Take a look here what IBM is doing regarding universities and
students:

http://db2expressc.blogspot.com/

IBM has a whole team that is focussed on promoting DB2 Express-C and
they visit
universities worldwide.

I would be more than happy if to see the same things happening for
IDS.

Ian Michael Gumby wrote:
There you go again Ian being the corporate apologist. <g>

Which part of the link I posted didn't work?

And remember that much of that 'other' company's offerings such as
JDeveloper are, and always have been, free of charge. But Tivoli
and Lotus are really not the point anymore than is Unbreakable Linux.
This is c.d.informix and the question is about Informix not lots of
other products whose relationship to Informix is marginal.
--
Daniel A. Morgan

Tool wrote:
Exactly. My interest in Informix, though others are welcome to
their opinions, is related to my job as an educator. And the
simple truth is that if you don't have a cadre of 20 and 30
year olds learning your technology in 10 or 20 years you are
history.

Students, today, can't even spell Informix much less have an
opportunity to learn it.

For a generation that has never lived a day of their lives without
a PC on the desktop the glory days of old and the days when Sybase
or Informix were king isn't worth as much as a cup of coffee.

The marketplace of the future is the students of today.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington

"Ian Michael Gumby" <im_gumby (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote

The fact is that most small businesses can't focus on, and therefore don't
want access to, a wide range of products.
If I'm writing a killer app to run on Informix for, say, the entertainment
sector, what possible interest is Lotus, or Tivoli, to me?

Neil Truby said:
This is, I believe, the nub of the problem. Real SMBs (not IBM's
definition) don't really give a monkey's left bollock about the breadth or
depth of IBM's software stack. They have a business problem, they need it
fixed. None of that other stuff really means anything to potential
Informix users.

--
Bye now,
Obnoxio

"I'm astonished anyone pays real money for this crap."
-- Cosmo

--
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is
believed to be clean.

"Obnoxio The Clown" <obnoxio (AT) serendipita (DOT) com> wrote


Neil Truby said:

depth of IBM's software stack. They have a business problem, they need it
fixed. None of that other stuff really means anything to potential
Informix users.

Thanks for the support, but that wasn't quite the point I was making.

What I'm trying to say is this:

End users might actually find the breadth of IBM's product range, its long
history and its strong brand reassuring (even if they don't want to use much
of the range right now, it's nice to know it's there).
But SMB end-users are, I would contend, best understood by Business Partners
that are themselves SMBs.
And it is those *partners* who are themselves SMBs who will be deterred by
the high cost of the "Value Package", partly because US$2,000 is peanuts to
Morse but not to them, and partly because they are likely to be interested
in a far narrow product set because they are small.