IBM's Frank Soltis, Uncensored

Dr. Frank Soltis, the IBM engineer who has been called "the AS/400's Elvis," recently shared a success story during a keynote speech at a user conference in Florida. This particular company was in the software distribution business and at one point had 23 AS/400s located around the world. The company was a very good customer, went from CISC to RISC, and was always one of the first to upgrade to new technology, he said.

Then came the Year 2000 problem, and despite five years of dedicated service during a period of great revenue growth, the company decided that it was time to move off the AS/400. So in June of 1999, the company unplugged its AS/400s and powered up the 1,200 NT servers it needed to replace them. But things didn't quite go as planned. "They found they couldn't make it work," Soltis told the crowd. "Today, one year after unplugging their AS/400s, they're back on the AS/400."

That company is Microsoft. "They viewed that as a point of embarrassment," Soltis said. "We thought it was kind of fun....Can you think of a company with greater incentive to move to NT, and they couldn't do it?"

Microsoft fired back, saying it didn't have any AS/400s; its business ran on NT. They claimed IBM was just full of itself and how typical the story was of IBM's ego.

IBM explained Microsoft outsourced their distribution business which continued to run on AS/400s. That way Microsoft could claim THEY didn't have any AS/400s. Nope. Not them. No AS/400s around there. Those AS/400s are someone else's. They just happen to be running Microsoft's business.

NOTE: I found this exact same text in various locations in the net, I assume it to be Public Domain now. If not just let me know I'll remove it.