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Two Tribes, One Future
Here's an excellent article by Michael Healey about Winn-Dixie bringing together both sides of the house:
The persistent mutual loathing of the distributed and mainframe camps is a daily personal drain for me. I remember when mainframes were collegiate coolness. Those were the days when Cornell ranked as a supercomputer center with just a couple of 3090 600s running AIX (on VM). I remember once writing to my manager (I was in a Unix job at the time), "I have no allergy to the mainframe". Even then, so-called "Unix people" and "Windows people" (don't forget Mac people) treated it like alien goo, and it has gotten worse. Similarly, the z/OS crowd is still slow to warm up to Unix System Services even when it has been built-in for fifteen years. And the CMS community has been no better, having squandered their robust shell and utilities for that same period. (They do score points for embracing ... even pushing ... Linux on the mainframe.)
Come together, people! The new attitude in self improvement is not to dread, hide, and fight your weaknesses but instead to embrace, foster, and advertise your strengths. We can do the same, promoting what our platform does best and acknowledging what the other does best. Let's not bicker and argue about who crashed who. But Healey is right; it's gotta start at the top. Are you the CIO? You stand to gain a lot ... or lose big. Shatter your silos. Make the most of the technologies.
-- R;
| by sirsanta | September 1, 2009 Permalink |
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Comments
If IBM was seriously interested in changing people's attitudes regarding the mainframe, they would market power-efficient laptops, workstations, and servers based on mainframe cpus and channels in a 110V form-factor with software priced appropriately. What people cannot affordably experience, they cannot understand.
Posted by: dayan | Sep 30, 2009 6:10:31 AM
As a "mainframer" working in a mixed distributed/mainframe environment, I've managed to pick up the skills/knowledge of Unix/Linux and Windows as well as the majority of my "mainframer" co-workers. However, my experience has been that the distributed folks seem to refuse to learn anything about the mainframe, seeing it as outdated, or having a limited lifespan in todays IT world, or perhaps they're intimidated.
Posted by: desksamess | Nov 10, 2009 1:39:13 PM
