Re: Announcing: The IBM Customer Advisory Council for Informix

Double Echo said: > > Perhaps not as much as one would hope for. That's nothing to do with IBM, even -- any company that size tend to consolidate any decision making at a very high level. > But what about the real skulduggery that engineered the buyout > in the first place? These are the people I'd like to get training > from. When the deals were struck and the body was being carved up, > I can only get the impression that a large amount of the legacy cancer > came along with the package. Instead of seizing the day, these > individuals decided to sit on their hands, and do little. Some took > the money and ran, but more tragic, many stayed, and sat on their hands. Well, I tell you what, why don't you go work for IBM as a complete unknown and get them to drop the obviously inferior DB2 and only promote the obviously superior IDS? Are you now saying that people like Mark Scranton are not doing enough? Who exactly are you blaming for this, and what do you hope to achieve by fixing the blame? In any company, whether it's Informix, IBM, GE or GlaxoSmithKline, the grunts on the floor count for absolutely NOTHING. The customers are the people who can influence things, and if they don't, no amount of screaming by staff cannon fodder will achieve anything. > This is where we are today, and a lot of people don't understand that > unless you bang a frying pan, or explode ordinance, nobody at Informix > and now IBM, is going to listen, much less change anything. The CAC, No. Unless the people with the cheque books bang their pans or explode ordinance, no-one is going to listen. No-one at IBM is listening to Informix staff, or business partners, or advocacy groups. They will only listen to the people who give them money. (Which is quite sensible, really.) > while valuable on its own merits, is a signal that change is in the > wind. It means a direct channel, wide open to customers, is available > and allow input. But it does not guarantee anything will happen just > because it exists. Change and 'repair' will only happen if enough people > and companies take advantage of it. Those "grunts" stand a better chance > today of making a difference if this CAC takes off and really gets things > moving. IBM should take the opportunity to take the road less traveled > and have this CAC distance itself from the IIUG as much as possible so > that its success can be on its own merits and not because it leaned on a > politically charged organization that in many ways has created more > problems than it has solved. Had the IIUG been a bit more objective > in its approach to Informix, and now IBM, it might have been able to > accomplish a lot more, and made a stronger, more credible message for > IBM to not only protect the product, but the brand as well. I won't comment on the IIUG's impartiality, all I can say is: no-one is going to listen to an advocacy group if they don't see a commercial benefit. Gyenes & co clearly had a vision of flogging Informix off from the outset (the bastards!) And the previous management had clearly lost direction entirely -- as far as I'm concerned, they had given up, it was only the commitment of the rank and file that kept Informix going. Those execs weren't interested in listening to advocacy, because they thought it was pointless. Under circumstances like that, what difference does it make about how impartial the IIUG was or wasn't? And, of course, if you don't like the IIUG, you can always set up your own, independent advocacy group and see what you can achieve. -- Bye now, Obnoxio "C'est pas parce qu'on n'a rien ' dire qu'il faut fermer sa gueule" - Coluche did i mention i like nulls? heck, i even go so far as to say that all columns in a table except the primary key could/should be nullable. this has certain advantages, for example, if you need to insert a child record and you don't have a parent row for it, just do an insert into the parent table with the primary key value (everything else null), and voila, relational integrity is preserved. but this is, admittedly, a bit controversial among modellers. --r937, dbforums.com