Re: database market share 2003

Serge Rielau allegedly said,on my timestamp of 7/06/2004 10:29 PM:

> It is a bit like me going out there and asking Mark Townsend to _admit_
> that RDB licenses are counted under Oracle's marketshare. Well, I

If they are and I'm not aware of such a thing, then it is EQUALLY wrong and as blatantly deranged as IBM's claims. And quite frankly if that is what Gartner is doing, they truly deserve the title of morons. Even Oracle admits RDB is a "hierarchical db" and doesn't have the nerve to call it relational!

> Small code size. The point I wanted to make is that the decision what is
> DB2 and what is OS/400 seems rather arbitrary looking in from the
> outside.

Agreed 100%.

 > IBM could for all intents and purposes declare that DB2 for
> i/Series IS the operation system and provides a file-system interface.
> the name OS/400 would disappear and that would be that. You would simply
> have to deal with it :-)

Sure. And IBM would also have to deal with the derogatory and derisive comments of a sizable portion of the industry. Not that it would matter: a couple of marketing blitzes and it would be all past history.

> OK, so AS/400 had DBMS marketshare numbers long before DB2 UDB came out.

Of course.

> Should these customers ,old and new depending on what you count, now
> suddenly just fall off because they didn't have a sexy DBMS name for
> what they were doing?

We are not talking the market share of the AS400, last time I looked. Or rather: we are, indirectly. A very large number that skews overall presence of UDB and provides as inaccurate a gage of the true market as it can be.

> We refer to DB2 as a "Family of Products". Just like other vendors have
> multiple products under the same product line, so does IBM.

All in dah family, eh? :)

> E.g. where are the DBMS's for mobile devises logged?

z/OS, obviously! At the very least. I'm even willing to bet IBM will release "CICS-for-the-PDA" real soon now. All under Websphere, of course... :)

> "DB2 Information Management" and comprises DB2 Record Manager, DB2
> Everyplace, DB2 Content Manager, DB2 for Unix, Windows and Linux, DB2
> for z/OS and DB2 for i/Series (I may have forgotten a couple).. and also
 > the Informix products, which are part of the group, but don't carry the  > name.

I'd say you probably forgot half a dozen. And that's just this semester...

>
> If you ask nicely and are willing to pay more than the $100 US they ask
> for, maybe they let you peek deeper into these numbers.

Not even remotely interested, at ANY price. Quite frankly I find all these market "analysis" a sad joke.

> I'm not sure how that works if I buy Oracle collaboration suite or one
> of the Apps. The later made quite a point of running only on Oracle DB
> though. So you end up with an Oracle license just the same merely by
> running Oracle Financials or whatever... and I have no problem with that.

Yes. There is no secret whatsoever in that. Oracle make it QUITE clear that their apps REQUIRE Oracle db server, and a license for it is mandatory. It is NOT bundled in any way, shape or format. Like the DB2/AS400 one is.

> When you decide to by a Griddle and BBQ from Hamilton-Beach. Is it
> immoral for Hamilton Beach to say they sold a Griddle?

If they don't charge for it and just bundle it in, yes. They sold nothing. They just gave it away as part of the product. Kinda like the vacuum cleaner sales reps with the ubiquitous kitchen knife set. A marketing prop, not a mainstay product. Oldest trick in the book.

> You KNEW you would be buying a combination. If you wanted to buy only a
> table BBQ you could have done so. And you could have done so cheaper.

Try to buy a AS400 WITHOUT the SQL component and see how much change you get...

> Unless we agree to disagree which is OK. The doesn't need to be a
> winner. There never is in these debates anyway.

Agreed 100%.

> *lol* The last thing our smart cookies want to deal with is marketing.
> That is on eof IBMs bigger problems :-)

I apologize: one should NEVER wish marketing on anyone.... :)

> Well teh OR stuff was still mapped to Relational if that's what you
> mean, but XML has a lot more "umpf" to it.

Actually I think XML *is* the solution to OR mapping. Or rather a XML schema. But, we digress...

> Then why do you care so much about whether IBM labels a sale in data a
> DB2 sale or a
> *funnwordhere*-sale. Neither for a customer, nor for a stockholder, nor
> for an IBM employee should it matter.

It does when a customer may be misled into believing they are buying into a widely tested and widely used product when it is neither. Then again, we better not go into Oracle's "testing"... ;)

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au.nospam