News that the Gartner Group has published a detailed but fairly critical report on IBM’s AS/400 computer will not bother the development and marketing team in Rochester, Minnesota. In spite of the fact that nearly half a million machines have been sold over a decade, worth more than $100bn to IBM in hardware and software sales, this is the first time that the Gartner Group had dedicated an Executive Summary Report to the machine. Now the recent makeover of the AS/400 into an e-commerce server seems to have persuaded Gartner Group to give it some serious attention. Or perhaps it is because Gartner Group has realised that the AS/400 community is made up of the kind of people who are happy to spend $850 for a report on one of the most widely discussed and written about machines in the history of computing.
