Re: informix market share
RollForward Wizard wrote: > Mark Townsend wrote: > >> DA Morgan wrote: >> >>> Somewhere in the >>> DB2 kernel there is an instruction something like: TRUNCATE PERSPECTIVE. >> >> >> Hey - thats funny :-) >> >> Does Informix has a REVOKE ALL HOPE FROM USERS command ? > > > LOL. > > Doesn't Oracle have: > > TRUNCATE BANK ACCOUNT WITHOUT WAITING > SET CAPTURE TARGET ORACLE > FLUSH ACCOUNT > COMMIT Seems to me that some of your fellow Informix folks here have been reporting their licenses costing them multiples of the Oracle price. So if Oracle has that command then presumably Informix's new logo is: "Informix: Where speed counts. We will get from where you to bankruptcy faster than any other commercial RDBMS." -- Daniel A. Morgan http://www.psoug.org damorgan@x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond)
DA Morgan wrote: > > Seems to me that some of your fellow Informix folks here have been > reporting their licenses costing them multiples of the Oracle price. > This is what I could never get my head around with the way IBM went forward with Informix. For a billion dollars they got a database that had a great set of features (much more than DB2), measurable market share, an extremely loyal customer base eager for a white knight (no pun intended), a reasonably good partner base, and a dedicated sales force who could actually make real money from selling a great product with a good price point ...... ..... and they walked away from it, prefering instead to use a non-dedicated sales force to push an inferior product by discounting and/or bundling heavily. It's not really a marketing problem. Marketing is just there to support the sales engine. If the troops in the accounts aren't pushing the product, then nothing is going to happen. My preception is that this applies for both Informix and DB2 at IBM - the former because they just ignored it (or weren't even told about it), the second because there's a preception by the sales force of no money because of the discount/bundling deals, so why even get into the fight. Such a waste. They should fire someone. If they haven't already retired.
Mark Townsend wrote: > DA Morgan wrote: > >> >> Seems to me that some of your fellow Informix folks here have been >> reporting their licenses costing them multiples of the Oracle price. >> > > This is what I could never get my head around with the way IBM went > forward with Informix. > > For a billion dollars they got a database that had a great set of > features (much more than DB2), measurable market share, an extremely > loyal customer base eager for a white knight (no pun intended), a > reasonably good partner base, and a dedicated sales force who could > actually make real money from selling a great product with a good price > point ...... > > > ..... and they walked away from it, prefering instead to use a > non-dedicated sales force to push an inferior product by discounting > and/or bundling heavily. Nice spin doctoring. Informix was going down fast before IBM stepped in. Also I strongly disagree with DB2 being inferior. Both products have different strengths. DB2 for LUW is a multi-purpose DBMS, handling both BI and OLTP reasonably well; IDS is a superb OLTP engine but without OLAP, materialized views, scale out, powerful, orthogonal SQL, ... . While Informix was investing into Illustra and a multi-threaded engine, IBM executed on "Arrowhead" and implemented the most powerful SQL query capabilities in the industry with the Starburst compiler. Also DB2 had a fair set of GUI tooling and client integration which IDS was missing when IBM purchased Informix. Different trajectory. Can't say a car is inferior/superior to a motorcycle. Doesn't work that way. Cheers Serge -- Serge Rielau DB2 SQL Compiler Development IBM Toronto Lab