ROGERWAT@WATDCS.BITNET ("AssocDir,CompServ,UWaterloo Roger Watt") (12/10/87)
> I believe that our campus is not atypical. From what I see being > discussed in this list, it certainly isn't. Is IBM marching to a > different drummer? If these two products are an indication of IBM's > strategic direction, will IBM be marching alone? From my perspective, I see IBM caught in an interesting position ... it continues to push SNA as its "strategic networking product" to an academic/research world in which it claims to have renewed its interest, while Europe is clearly going OSI and the academic/research environment in the US is clearly going TCP/IP and I expect that the academic/research environment in Canada will do the same. At this rate, in a few years, there won't be a graduating student on either side of the Atlantic who has been raised in an SNA environment, and IBM will find itself in a "networking" cultural vacuum very much like the "computing" cultural vacuum that its academic-marketing arm has been trying to overcome. IBM has some excellent products, but I don't believe that re-packaging products from the business-dp marketplace and attempting to call them "academic products" is being well accepted in the academic/research environment. By comparison, IBM Research (eg, the way it is supporting FAL) is a bright light on an otherwise-gloomy horizon.