Application Development

I am part of the LinkedIn community and a member of several groups in LinkedIn.  One of the groups I am a member of is the IBM i Professionals group.  I get a weekly summary of activity and sometimes there are comments on the posts that people have made.  Usually there are no more than 3-5 comments.  What caught my attention is a LinkedIn post that had 23 comments.   The original post referenced this blog post:  http://blog.angustheitchap.com/?p=159  In this post, the author talks about the iSeries application development community needing to pull together to DO something about the lack of support for the platform.  He asks the question: What have YOU done for the IBM i platform this week?

As a former iSeries application developer, I thought it was a good question, perhaps about 10 years too late, but a good question none the less.  Let me state for the record that the iSeries is a great platform and it is without a doubt the best box for business that IBM has. 

The problem is that it is a victim of its own success.  There is no other platform where an application written in the 1980’s could still run un-touched even though the underlying hardware has changed numerous times.  To me the core issue is this: IBM is no longer in the hardware business; meaning they don’t derive that much revenue from hardware anymore.  The majority of IBM’s revenue comes from services.  The iSeries does not need or generate the services revenue that other platforms do.  So in my opinion, it’s an economic issue and no amount of doing or community is going to change that.