Businessweek’s monster report on IBM this week comes out pretty bearish – especially for those who can grasp what is entailed in making its latest strategy to get the mainframe market moving again: the strategy is outlined as the progressive recasting of System 370 architecture until in a few years it is internally a completely new machine, no doubt looking a lot more like the AS/400, with Systems Application Architecture simultaneously protecting customer investment in software while isolating the software from the underlying hardware; at the same time, SAA is intended to unlock the barriers to distributed database so that anyone on a terminal attached to the mainframe can get answers that neccessitate interrogating databases on a wide range of machines attached to the corporate network around the world; it would store electronic images, voice messages and video as well as data, but that would happen anyway; one drawback of the new strategy is that according to Businessweek, Summit will not now appear until 1991, another is that a grand strategy can’t be kept a secret for long, IBM’s solutions are hideously expensive, and while users may buy the strategy, they will likely buy it from others who can implement it much more cheaply.
