Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!necntc!ames!ucbcad!ucbvax!WATDCS.BITNET!ROGERWAT From: ROGERWAT@WATDCS.BITNET ("AssocDir,CompServ,UWaterloo Roger Watt") Newsgroups: comp.protocols.ibm Subject: IBM Strategic Directions, fromMessage-ID: <8712101409.AA04012@jade.berkeley.edu> Date: 10 Dec 87 13:08:03 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: "AssocDir,CompServ,UWaterloo Roger Watt" Organization: The ARPA Internet Lines: 20 > 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.