Louis Gerstner has really laid it on the line with the AS/400 people – mainframes ain’t going to make any money, personal computers are losers, the RS/6000 goes out on margins like cigarette paper and in distressingly low volumes, so the AS/400 crew has got to do a lot better than it had planned on doing to save everyone’s bacon: on that basis the AS/400 Advanced 36 is a runaway winner – IBM should get 50,000 of the things away in the next six months, and they cost virtually nothing to build; the chip may be expensive because of low yields, but IBM was going to have to goup that learning curve even without a whole crowd of 36 users acting as test-beds or guinea pigs.
