The following material is taken intact from a March 1990
VMSHARE append by
Melinda Varian
of Princeton University,
during an electronic conversation discussing an anonymous IBMer
claiming that VM was going away.
Well, folks, this has been going on for more than twenty years now. Indeed, I'm willing to bet that there hasn't been a month in the last two decades during which some high-ranking IBMer didn't tell some group of customer executives that VM was a dead-end system. They used to say that TSO was the alternative, rather than AIX, but that's the only difference.The people giving your managers this great advice are the same sort who swore that there'd never be more than 500 VM installations and that VM would be dead by the mid-1970's.
VM has managed to outlive some of these guys and to make the others look pretty silly. But new generations of them keep going out and doing it again. I suspect that there's little we can do to stop them, but we don't have to believe them.
VM would certainly have died if all customers had listened to IBM, but the managements at the early VM sites were people who did not believe that IBM is the source of all wisdom and who weren't afraid to tell IBM that it was on the wrong track. All I can suggest that you do is tell your managers this history and add that you suspect that there's no reason to believe that there's been a substantial increase in wisdom or prescience inside IBM recently.
The VM customer community has always been a thorn in IBM's side, but it's clear that that's their own fault. In the early days, they made sure that only people who think for themselves would run VM. The result was to "select" VM customers for lack of docility. And that's been a very good thing for IBM, even though they haven't enjoyed it.
I must say that I am fascinated by their assumption that if they get us all converted to AIX, we'll remain IBM customers. Even assuming that they can get AIX working a whole lot more acceptably than it does now, their converting us to AIX will be all it takes to emancipate us from our dependence on them. Forever.
There are days when I look forward to that.
Melinda Varian
For the record, IBM subsequently appended to this file a strong statement of their support for VM, and making it clear that IBMers disparaging VM's future are speaking without the consent of IBM executive management.
(In March, 1996 similar silly remarks about VM's demise were attributed to unnamed IBMers, and again in 1997 and 1998. Nothing new...)