In California, people eat their pets. They’ll soon have to stop, or do it furtively, or drive to Nevada with one of those wicker pet carriers that looks a lot like a picnic basket. According to the Los Angeles Times, Governor George Deukmejian just signed into law a bill making it illegal, beginning January 1, 1990, to eat man’s best friend. There would be no need for a law banning the sinking of one’s canines into one’s canine if the practice were not rampant in California. Nor would there be a law if the majority believed that a rumbling stomach in line at the Bide-A-Wee animal home was entitled to the same freedom of choice as a like-sounding tummy at Taco Bell. Republics are like that: majorities rule, and sometimes overrule, minorities. But on balance, they manage to create laws that fairly reflect the popular consensus – however screwy it might be. Beagleburgers The acts regulating commerce are different from those governing beagleburgers; business is, after all, a dog-eat-dog world. In California, and just about everywhere else, you’re in trouble if you don’t pay for the computer equipment you install. But it is perfectly legal for a manufacturer to announce a disk controller, sell it, and then take a year to get it working right. It is also traditional for the owner of a disk drive to absorb the indirect costs of its premature demise, even if the cause of the disk’s early expiration is a death sentence handed down in secrecy by a star-chamber in Armonk. It’s never caveat vendor.Laws also mandate punishment – sometimes draconian, often controversial – for behaviour they proscribe. Although I am signing this bill, Deukmejian carped, I do not believe it is appropriate to impose criminal penalties for a violation of this law. Those convicted of serving Rover with Rice-A-Roni face a fat fine and up to six months in the slammer. Perhaps there should be a more fitting penalty, one a judge could call for without feeling unusually cruel. As it stands, the courts are unlikely to hound the hungry for what is, so to speak, a petty crime.New York is justly renowned as the capital of laws that can’t or won’t be enforced. There, the governmYSCas, as usual, failed to curb those who fail to curb their curs, despite criminal sanctions. If the City Fathers want to curtail the spontaneous gastric motility of dogs and the habitual sociopathic behaviour of their owners, maybe they should prohibit dog-owners from wearing shoes. Alternatively, the city could offer homes to a few thousand dog-eating Californians and let nature take its course. Endangered species, for the most part, are even more carefully coddled than the overly common collie. In Florida, animal lovers have long defended the manatee, a cute if dumb and slovenly creature with a knack for getting run over by maniacs in power boats. Lately, encouraged by their success mustering fans of the sea cow, greenists and their fellow travellers have taken to task none less than the Disney organisation for allegedly beating birds on its private nature preserve. The press, in its usual state of fervour, rushed to smear the company, ignoring all the important facts: Disney has made every effort to convince a callous public that helpless orphaned animals are cute. The law, such as it is, will deal with Disney and, we are confident, vice versa. The IBM customer has not suffered from a violation of statute. At worst, the large system user has been wounded by a breach of faith. Money went into deals, but promises – both explicit and implied – were not completely kept. But this distinction has not stood in the way of retribution. Unlike the law, which seeks justice in the courts, commerce conducts its trials in the marketplace. And it is in the marketplace that IBM is receiving its punishment. There is no direct proof of a cause-and-effect relationship between IBM’s disk subsystem problems, users’ disillusionment, and sluggish sales at the high end. But the circumstantial evidence bears examination. Users resent IBM’s inability to level with them when it knew it had serious problems wit
h 3990 microcode and again with 3380 HDA bearings. It does not matter that the company may have had good reasons for its reticence, or that it might have made a couple of honest mistakes. Admittedly, we are in no position to second-guess IBM. We don’t know of a clever policy that would have saved IBM from itself. But we’re quite confident that the company’s reaction to its failures was not its only alternative. Unfortunately, something went wrong with the company’s creative problem-solving process; necessity practised birth control. IBM, like the decaying New York, neither invented nor borrowed an idea with which to manage an unfortunate situation. Instead, the company continued with business as usual despite every indication that its problems were hardly routine. It shipped 3990-3 controllers, all the while downplaying the lack of two features that made the machines so much more worthwhile than their predecessors. It hid from customers the risks inherent in using a whole year’s production of 3380-Js and -Ks, knowing that few users would have installed the things if they had known the whole story. Ironically, if the 3990-3 offered the Dual Copy feature when first promised, customers could have ameliorated the potential data losses caused by an unexpected 3380 failure. As its sales force backed and filled but didn’t back-order or even fill order books in the storage market, IBM based its mainframe pitch on ESA. But the selling of ESA, even if every bit of IBM iron and code worked better than planned, has been flawed from the inception. The last two big operating systems leaps taken by users were absolutely necessary. And everyone knew it. Dog meat During the 370 product cycle, virtual storage enabled mainframes to support greatly increased numbers of terminals at a time when user enterprises were sorely pressed to do so. As the 308X line was brought to market, IBM unveiled XA software, again relieving constraints that had stifled the best efforts of the most advanced computing shops. ESA, by contrast, does not directly address any of the customer’s pressing difficulties. The market’s reaction is reminiscent of a conversation that occurred in Paris in 1946. The writer Gertrude Stein lay on her deathbed, attended by her intimate companion, Alice B Toklas. What is the answer?, Stein asked Toklas. Toklas was silent. Stein spoke again. In that case, she said, what is the question? and expired. A parallel conversation must occur between IBM marketing types and customers all the time, as users react to the IBM technical pitch by asking, So what? IBM’s move to provide CASE tools, its deployment of the PR/SM takeoff on Amdahl’s Multiple Domain Feature and its yeoman effort to speed up DB2 are obviously useful to many customers. But these IBM offerings are perceived as having mainly tactical value; they do not address a strategic problem. The main reason IBM has not been able to present a strategic vision to its customers – nor abstract one from their vast aggregate experience – is that neither side has a clear vision of the future. That vision, more than unfocussed technological potential, is what it will take to revitalise the mainframe world. Without it, IBM’s most important business will be dog meat. (C) 1989 Technology News of America Co
