Will complacency kill IBM i?

While most westerners rejoiced the recent events of unrest and social reform in the middle east, i am sure many also asked "what took them so long?"

When I tried to answer the question myself about why a large group of intelligent, educated people would accept such leadership, and along with it a stranglehold on their innovation and freedom for so long, i realized that all communities fall into that trap at some stage. Its called complacency.

The IBM i community is no exception.

Think about it for a moment. there has been no real innovation our of IBM i that is directly relevant to the IBM i community since the 80's. in fact there have been some serious misdemeanors on their part. here's a couple: ILE - what's the point of that? if you going to go OO, go OO, don't just poke at it with a long stick! a friend of mine who worked on the RPG compiler team at that time told me that there was a real plan to go the whole way, and truly modernize RPG, but it was vetoed by management. here's another: webfacing - no further comment needed. what about WDSc? basically it destroyed your PC just to get a notepad style code editor up! no wonder people still use SEU. EGL? Great idea, even pretty good implementation for IBM, totally pointless in reality. Scenario: "Hey IBM i have 5 million lines of RPG, and aging work force. i love the platform and IBM. what should i do? answer: Rewrite your entire code base in a language no one uses, using a work force that doesn't exist. huh?

What exactly is a third party vendor? I have asked this question of many people, Mike Smith (ex IBM Chief Architect), Jon Paris, myself, Rich Hume, end users, developers, ISV's, in fact anyone i can ambush into listening to me. The answer it seems is: "not IBM"

So what IP grew the IBM i community to its current size? Firstly of course OS/400 and RPG. But from that moment on: MAPICS, BPICS, JDE, System 21, SYNON, LANSA, PRMS, essentially third party vendors. or rather "not IBM".

There are many in the IBM i community that would skip a system i news mag article about the science of business rules recovery of RPG systems with X-Analysis because it is labeled"Advertorial", in favor of 15 pages of how RDi miraculously helps them edit the one program they write per year these days. Similarly there are some who whinge to Jon Paris about third party vendors lowering the tone of his events and events like his.

the last few publications and events that remain as the conduits to the IBM i community, and who still support the "not IBM" mantra as a given are thankfully giving way to more viral and real communities such as we see on some linked in groups.

I don't think complacency will kill the IBM i community, but hopefully it will kill the bovine leaches who are too lazy to listen to anything but the PR drivel that mostly comes from IBM these days.