PH on other OSes

[Bill D Michael]

The mindset within Cognos seems to be that they have a lot of BI tools that
sell for a small amount per copy and make a lot of revenue, and then they
have the ADT tools that sell for a very large amount per copy and generate
little income, but require little effort. So they concentrate on the BI
tools. Short of selling PowerHouse to a smaller company that would devote a
lot of resources to it, the best hope we PH fanatics have is if Cognos
changes their mindset - turn PowerHouse into a truly multi-platform tool
again, drop the price per "seat" considerably, and ramp up the marketing.

Linux and OS X versions sold for a few hundred dollars, with a good "demo"
version of each available for free download, could easily sell thousands of
copies. But Cognos simply isn't prepared to handle that many PH customers,
even if the total annual income would be much greater. Look at what's
happened with PowerHouse PC (which was done VERY poorly at the beginning,
dooming it before it ever had a chance). Given the number of Unix versions
Cognos _does_ support, you can't tell me that recompiling and testing for a
few more Unix-based OSes would be _that_ difficult - it's just a question
of proving that the investment would generate the necessary returns.

Think about the exposure having a demo copy of PH on every Red Hat, Debian,
Mandrake, or Yellow Dog Linux distribution CD, and every Mac Developer
Tools CD, would give. Don't _just_ think "big system Linux" like AS400, but
think about the thousands and thousands of Intel & AMD Linux boxes out
there, and all the Mac G5s and XServes.

I would think the little-endian vs. big-endian issue is a non-starter; if
the 8.x PH code is even reasonably "common sourced", it's all in C now, and
the low-level issues are the compiler's problem.

How many of us on this list would LOVE to be able to tell some small
business that yes, we can write them a custom package to do "x", and all
they need is a Linux P4 or an XServe sitting in a closet to run it? Being a
"Mac person", I can tell you that the dual-processor 2GHz 1GB G5 sitting
under my desk at home is just as fast as the older Alpha box we use for PH
development every day! I know there's equally capable Intel boxes out
there, Windows _or_ Linux. But no, to sell a PH solution today, you're
talking about $50K and up instead of $5K easily, and that limits the market
considerably.

Bill

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"This posting reflects the individual views and opinions of the author and
does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of International
Paper."

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"This posting reflects the individual views and opinions of the author and
does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of International
Paper."