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They were pretty much the only game in town, other than IBM and smaller mainframe vendors, if you wanted actual written, binding, guarantees of performance with
by MichaelZuo 2y ago
They were pretty much the only game in town, other than IBM and smaller mainframe vendors, if you wanted actual written, binding, guarantees of performance with penalty clauses. (e.g. with real consequences for system failure, such as being credited back X millions of dollars after Y failure)
At least from what I heard pre-HP acquisition, so it’s not ‘amazing lock in’, just that, if you didn’t want a mainframe and needed such guarantees, there was literally no other choice.
- lazide 2y agoNotably, that is amazing lock in. What else would it look like?
- MichaelZuo 2y agoWell if just price/performance alone is enough to qualify… viz. IBM, Then the moment another mainframe vendor decided to undercut them by say 20%, the lock in would evaporate. Of course no mainframe vendor would likely do so, but the latent possibility is always there. Facebook is an example of ‘amazing lock in’ where it’s not theoretically possible for any potential competitor to just negate it with the stroke of a pen.
- lazide 2y agoThe reason they are locked in is because they are the only game in town for this use case, done this way. That’s why I’m saying it, yeah? It isn’t a price point thing.
- MichaelZuo 2y agoIn that sense IBM offers a better ‘game’ in every way, but at 10x the price point… because they are playing a different, more advanced, ‘game’ that so happens to include Tandem’s ‘game’ as a subset.
- lazide 2y agoThat just means they’re locking in a different segment. Do you think folks locked into to MS Access are the same people locked into Oracle databases?
- MichaelZuo 2y agoYes but its something that can disappear with the stroke if a pen, which is the critical difference, the durability.