Sometimes corporations luck out with a product that hits the sweet spot of the market and stays there for years. IBM has had such products for much of its corporate life; among the current is the AS/400 midrange line. Heck, I vividly remember attending the global product announcement of the AS/400 back in 1988 because my employer at the time, Central Holiday Tours, used an older System 34 that was in need of replacement. Getting a lease on an AS/400 was one of the first computer related deals I ever made.
Anyway, one of the ways IBM has been milking the customer base over the last few years has been a special program that tells the system how much effort to allocate to a certain type of application. A type that is used by many, if not all, AS/400 customers. A program that can cost anywhere from tens of thousands of dollars to millions.
But another company has been selling an application, called Fast400, at an apparently much lower price, that tells the system the same thing. Surprise, surprise, IBM doesn’t like it. So they’re trying to tell customers that Fast400 violates their license and IBM will not provide service to machines on which it is installed. Storage Solutions Group, the program’s publisher, points out that, contrary to IBM statements, their application does not modify the system in the way IBM claims and therefore does not cause any violatation of the customer license.
No, it just pulls a pile of cash off the IBM stack.
BillSaysThis 